Gerald Feinberg, the Columbia University physicist, once went so far as to declare that 'everything possible will eventually be accomplished.' Well, that of course left only the impossible as the one thing remaining for daring intellectual adventurers to whittle away at Feinberg, for one, thought that 'they'd succeed even there.' (2) It was a point worth considering. How many times in the past had certain things been said to be impossible, only to have it turn out shortly thereafter that the item in question had already been done or soon would be. What greater cliche was there in the history of science than the comic litany of false it-couldn't-be-dones the infamous case of Auguste Comte saying in 1844 that it would never be known what the stars were made of, followed in a few years by the spectroscope being applied to starlight to reveal the stars' chemical composition or the case of Lord Rutherford, the man who discovered the structure of the atom, saying in 1933 mat dreams of controlled nuclear fission were 'moonshine.' And those weren't even the worst examples. No, the huffiest of all it-couldn't-be-done claims centered on the notion that human beings could actually fly, either at all, or across long distances, or to the moon, the stars, or wherever else. (3) There had been so many embarrassments of this type that about mid-century Arthur C. Clarke came out with a guideline for avoiding them, which he termed Clarke's Law: 'When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.' (4) Still, one had to admit there were lots of things left that were really and truly impossible, even if it took some ingenuity in coming up with a proper list of examples. Such as. 'A camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle.' (Well, unless of course it was a very large needle.) On 'It is impossible for a door to be simultaneously open and closed.' (Well, unless of course it was a revolving door.) (5) Indeed, watertight examples of the really and truly impossible were so exceptionally hard to come by that paradigm cases turned out to be either trivial or absurd. 'I know I will never play the piano like Vladimir Horowitz,' offered Milton Rothman, a physicist, 'no matter how hard I try'. Or, from Scott Lankford, a mountaineer 'Everest on roller skates.' The false it-couldn't-be-dones in science are comic because ______.