"Obviously..."

Is obviously a bad word.  What someone likely means when he or she says "obviously" is "observably,"  as in "this is what is observable here," in which case "obviously" is the wrong word, because it implies a collusion of the speaker with the listener. What's obvious to you, however, may not be at all obvious to me.  So it's a dangerous word, or at least a superfluous word, if you're really trying to understand something by discussing it with another person.

In The Rise of the New Physics, the writer D. A'Bro (that abbreviated name is all I know about him or her) says something like: the obvious is not necessarily credited with any deep significance in science.  Which is one reason I love the movie A Serious Man.  It's pretty much a frontal attack on the obvious, starting with the question of whether the old man in the Yiddish "cartoon" at the beginning of the movie is a dybbuk. I say "cartoon" because one of the Coens, in the interview included with the movie on the DVD, nostalgically compares this opening sequence to the cartoons that once-upon-a-time in U.S.  theaters preceded the movie--and also back then, you could only see movies at the theater (unless they were old enough to appear occasionally on TV).  No movie rentals in 1967!  Not until about 1980.

MARSHAK (the physicist)

Robert Marshak, an almost-famous physicist, would have been 94 this year on October 11 (yesterday).  He was a Brooklyn kid who graduated from high school at 15 and from Columbia College at 20.  As a 22 year old graduate student in physics at Cornell, he helped Hans Bethe work out the theory of the particular series of nuclear fusion reactions that allow stars to exist.  (Bethe won the Nobel prize--in 1967--for the discovery.)  Marshak also worked as assistant chief of the theoretical division at Los Alamos during the development of the first atomic bomb.  Then, later on, he did some theoretical elementary particle work that nearly won him a Nobel prize.  See his obituary which appeared in the New York Times on Christmas Day 1992, or see the Wikipedia article about him for info on his published physics work.  His death was caused by accidental drowning at Cancun two days before Christmas.

From what I can tell, he was a very wise man, although since he died at age 76 (like Einstein), he never was very wise and very old at the same time, like the Rabbi Marshak allegedly was.  The fact that Rabbi Marshak turns away Larry in his hour of great need seems to indicate he was getting senile.  More about that later.