3.
THE MAP PARADOX
On June 15, 1919, Karl Popper left his family’s Vienna apartment to join several thousand demonstrators marching to demand that the government free a group of jailed communists. Half the protestors were communists, others teenage boys. The sixteen-year-old Karl Popper was both. Just before noon, the crowd broke into a run and approached Vienna’s Hörlgasse shouting for guards to release the prisoners. In that narrow street, the protesters collided with a cordon of police on foot and horseback, breaking the wave and leaving them facing off with the police.1 The police would later be criticized for their brutality, but they had every reason to fear the worst. The previous evening they had arrested more than a hundred communist ...
