SINFUL DESIRES
“You’re proving something about a system that behaves in a specific way under these conditions. If the system doesn’t actually behave that way, the proof describes something that doesn’t exist.”
“I can add a constraint,” he said.
“Adding a constraint changes the scope,” she said. “The proof no longer says what you claimed it says.”
He sat down without being invited to.
She let him.
He looked at step fourteen in the copy of his own proof he’d brought.
“Walk me through the physical objection,” he said.
She got up and went to the whiteboard.
She wrote the equations on the right side of the board, working through what the system actually did at the boundary, and he watched her write and followed