In a Flat Spin

Extract

An announcement of Wing Commander Anderson's recent death appears on another page. Mr William's spirited criticism of Anderson's ‘Rotations in Navigation’, and by implication his more recent note on Coriolis (May 1983 issue), was of course written before the sad news was known. It is published here without modification (and in spite of the author's offer to withdraw it) as would undoubtedly have been Wing Commander Anderson's wish.

At the end of the last war Wing Commander E. W. Anderson was one of the most distinguished practising navigators in the Royal Air Force. ‘Andy’, as he is known to so many, has since become navigation's leading exegete through his work in this Institute, his articles, lectures and books. ‘Rotations in Navigation’, however, has got him in a flat spin. The reason why has wider implications worth examining.

Andy starts by suggesting that the difficulty of explaining Coriolis ‘may be due to the intellectual danger of trusting mathematics without making sure that the right circumstances surround the formulae which emerge’. This observation illustrates how well one can write English without saying what one means. Circumstances, right or wrong, cannot surround a formula although the statement a formula makes may be irrelevant to our circumstances. It is precisely because pure mathematics is the language, as Russell put it, ‘in which we do not know what we are talking about or care whether what we say about it is true’, that applied mathematics is the language in which we are obliged to say what we mean or be seen to use the language wrongly.