“Testimony,” President Harold B. Lee once observed, “isn’t something you have today, and you are going to have always. A testimony is fragile. It is as hard to hold as a moonbeam. It is something you have to recapture every day of your life.”
Some critics have mocked such statements. Factual propositions, they say, don’t need to be “recaptured” every day. Chemists don’t hold meetings in which they express their confidence that water molecules are composed of an atom of oxygen accompanied by two atoms of hydrogen. Scientists feel no need to declare their unshakeable faith in Avogadro’s number or the importance of the covalent bond.
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