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By Root 843 0

of at least 100 percent.” How the cities calculate this is a mystery. The regulation asks the question: what is the percentage increase on the acquired line? Suppose there were 100 tons per year before the acquisition and 200 tons afterwards. One does not have to be a Richard Feynman to figure out that 200 tons is 100% greater than 100 tons. The formula 100 x (a / b) yields the percentage, when a equals the post-acquisition increase in tonnage (100 tons) and b equals the pre-acquisition tonnage (100 tons). But there is trouble when b equals zero, as it does here. Then there must be division by zero. Yet as mathematicians know, “you can’t legitimately divide by 0. ∞ doesn’t mean anything.”

The judge insisted that the cities were dividing by zero, and therefore they were mistaken in asking for an environmental impact statement.80

For all of his paroxysms about logical paradoxes, the judge was constructing an alternate reality where a mathematical problem was insoluble, when in fact the answer is very simple. All you have to do is ask yourself three questions. First: is there an increase in rail traffic on the line? (Yes. It’s going from zero to two trains per day.) Second: what would be a 100 percent increase over the current traffic on the line? (It would be zero trains: 100 percent times zero is zero.) The answers to these two questions allow you to answer the third, crucial question: is the increase in rail traffic on the line greater than or equal to a 100 percent increase over current traffic? (Yes. Two is greater than zero.) Since the answer to question three is yes, the regulation is satisfied—there is indeed an increase in rail traffic of at least 100 percent, so yes, an environmental impact statement is necessary.81 No mind-bending logic games required.

Courtrooms are terrible when it comes to matters of mathematical or scientific truth; too often, the alternate reality of proofiness prevails over genuine reality. Charlie Chaplin found this out the hard way in 1944 when a mentally unstable young woman, Joan Berry, accused him of fathering her daughter. It looked bad for Chaplin—he admitted having sex with her, though he claimed that the affair had ended months before the child was conceived. In addition to the paternity suit, Chaplin was facing federal charges. Since the alleged liaison took place in a different state, the government went after him for violating the Mann Act—transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” (The prosecution was probably motivated, at least in part, by the fact that the FBI had labeled Chaplin as a communist sympathizer.)

When the trial began, Chaplin had a wonderful stroke of luck. Doctors tested his blood, along with the mother’s and daughter’s, and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that he was not the father. The child’s blood type—type B—could not have been produced by a union between Chaplin (who had type O blood) and Berry (who had type A blood). As the doctors testified, “The result of these blood grouping tests is that in accordance with the well-accepted laws of heredity, the man, Charles Chaplin, cannot be the father of the child, Carol Ann Berry.” Unless there was some mistake with the test results (which could easily be repeated if there was any doubt of misconduct), it was almost 100 percent certain that an unknown man, who had either type B or type AB blood, was the father. Chaplin was clearly innocent of the accusations.

It didn’t matter. The prosecutor—and the courts—rejected the notion that the blood test was conclusive and pressed on with the trials, using such scientific evidence as a “resemblance” test, where jurors gazed intently at the baby to determine whether she looked like Chaplin. The Mann Act charges at first ended in a mistrial and then in an acquittal; however, in his paternity trial, Chaplin was found to be the father. The court’s truth—the legal truth—was that Chaplin was the father of Joan Berry’s baby, even though the Truth, with nearly absolute mathematical certainty, was otherwise. And the prosecutors and the judges knew it.