Word: absurdum
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Surely, replied the illustrious British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, nature would forbid such a reductio ad absurdum as a star so compressed that sit does not shine. But two other astronomers, Mount Wilson Observatory's Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade, were more intellectually adventurous...
...allow himself to think about other women, for he is consumed by guilt. In the last chapters of Love Story, Jenny tells "Preppie" not to feel guilty for robbing her of freedom and adventure. But Ollie believes that he should feel guilty, and so he does, ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nauseum...
...writing himself into a corner of silence. From the start, he was profoundly uninterested in the standard material of literature: heroes and heroines, simulacra of daily reality, incidents, resolution, endings happy or otherwise. Instead, the Dublin-born author seized with Irish tenacity a single perception: reductio is always ad absurdum. At the bottom of every problem, no matter how logically pared down to essentials, lies the abyss. That has been Beckett's destination all along. The wonder is not simply that he has persisted so obsessively at such a self-defeating task. Nor that he abandoned his native English...
...Galley trial as in the Water gate trials, publicity alone does not seem compelling reason to abort the jury sys tem. By reductio ad absurdum, that would establish a principle that fame, not the truth, shall make you free. All a defendant's constitutional guarantees remain, but the basis of the jury system is still a faith that in the end, jurors are rationally capable of rendering judgment, as if they were kicking Dr. Johnson's rock. ∙Lance Morrow
...proscribed by the law, which a President could legally undertake at indescribable cost to the Republic." Buckley imagined a number of fanciful actions for which a President should be indicted, such as commuting the sentences of all federal prisoners or taking a six-month vacation. Notwithstanding such reductio ad absurdum, Buckley says, the principle remains: "Congress has got to retain the right to pass judgment on gross presidential abuses: the true, and studied, disrespect for the sophisticated obligations of office...