The majority of my 720 days in West Lafayette were often discouraging. I will always carry the memory of a Purdue physical chemistry professor who posed a question to me outside his office. He was a short stocky man who wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. His question was, “What would the entropy be if a black man married a white woman, and moved into a white neighborhood?”...His modus operandi may have been to get me to understand the disorder and randomness of chemical processes, but, along with Bertrand Russel, he should not have been comparing apples with oranges, i.e., using a science metaphor to describe a social issue is problematic.
