The Biggs hoson is the threshold in legal markup theory of lexophysics beyond which any proposed amendment is syntactically safe: it cannot make any legal or commercial difference to the arrangements, but has enough formal significance so as not to be completely humiliating to ask for it, meaning that counsel can supplement what would otherwise be a meagre living entertaining such fripperies in the name of professionalism and commitment to the craft. So, checking football teams for punctuation, inserting counterparts clauses, preparing closing agendas and bible tables of contents and, in Biggs’ famous example, removing the bold from a full stop.
Financial cosmology
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A third option, asymptotically safe gravity, goes back still further, to 1976. It was suggested by physicist Steven Weinberg, one of the Standard Model’s chief architects. A natural way to develop a theory of quantum gravity is to add gravitons to the model. Unfortunately, this approach got nowhere, because when the interactions of the putative particles were calculated at higher energies, the maths seemed to become nonsensical. However, Weinberg, who died in July, argued that this apparent breakdown would go away (in maths speak, the calculations would be “asymptotically safe”) if sufficiently powerful machines were used to do the calculating.
- —The Economist, 28 August 2021
Even beyond totally pointless amendments, there are certain mark-up techniques that approach “asymptotic safety” as Weinberg envisaged it — they are not logically safe, but are practically safe — the events so far down the probability tail that, if they come about, no-one will think to blame the person drafting for unwanted consequence. So, entire agreement clauses, no oral modification provisions, force majeure elaborations; doubt avoidance.
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