ABSTRACT
The well-known science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), is remembered among other things for coining three ‘laws’. The first is that nothing is always absolutely so. The second and most famous asserts that 90 per cent of everything is crap. And, just in case you were curious about it, Sturgeon’s third law is it is not possible to assemble a device with small parts without dropping one in a deep-pile carpet. You may be relieved to know that I will concentrate more on the first and second laws and have very little to say about the third.
