Getting Shirty about Things: How Mere Mortals Are Defeated by Metaphysics

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BYLINE: Colin Bower

No man willingly wears a dirty shirt. Yet, at some stage between early morning, when a man dons a clean shirt, and late evening, when he removes a dirty shirt and tosses it contemptuously into the laundry basket, he is knowingly wearing a dirty shirt.

For if it was dirty when he took it off, it was previously also dirty. He perceives the shirt to have been clean all day, but somehow instantaneously dirty only at the moment of removal. Thus there are millions of men worldwide who spend a good part of every day wearing dirty shirts. That this occurs does not represent a failure of hygiene, but the failure of Newtonian science, which posits an imperturbably linear …