From 1958 to 1970 Wladimiro Dorigo, my father, directed a political and cultural magazine called "Questitalia" ("This italy"), where emerging political issues were discussed, and the ongoing transformations of Italian society were dissected by a distinguished group of intellectuals. I own a copy of all the 150 issues of that publication, and every once in a while I pick one of them out of the lot at random, and learn what Italy was 40 or 50 years ago.

It is a well-known fact that it is much easier to measure a physical quantity than to correctly assess the magnitude of the uncertainty on the measurement: the uncertainty is everything!

A trivial demonstration of the above fact is the following. Consider you are measuring the mass of the top quark (why, I know you do it at least once a week, just to keep mentally fit). You could say you have no idea whatsoever of what the top mass is, but you are capable of guessing, and your best guess is that the top mass is  twice the mass of the W boson: after all, you have read somewhere that the top quark decays into a W boson plus other stuff, so a good first-order estimate is 2x80.4= 160.8 GeV.

It feels good, for a die-hard sceptic like I am, to live and let unexplained phenomena die. The phenomena in question are measured deviations from the predictions of the Standard Model (SM), our wonderful theory of subnuclear interactions, which has been condemned to fail by theorists soon after its construction, but continues, disappointingly for many, to succeed in explaining experimental results.