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DEFINITION: (noun) A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument. SYNONYMS: sophism, sophistication. USAGE: Though they had all been taken in by the argument, they later claimed to have secretly known that it was pure sophistry.

Herman Melville, inspired by his whaling experiences on the South Seas, penned Moby Dick, the now famed tale of a deranged whaling captain's obsessive voyage to find and destroy the great white whale to whom he lost his leg. The novel is at once an exciting sea story, a sociological critique of American prejudices, a repository of information about whaling, and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of good and evil. What may have inspired Melville to name his whale Moby-Dick?

On Sunday, the Ulster Defence Association, the largest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, announced plans to disband its armed units. While the group intends to "put arms beyond use," leaders are refusing to hand the weapons over to international disarmament officials. The group is believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 400 people during the period Britain describes as "The Troubles." Since 1997, when an international commission was formed to oversee decommissioning of paramilitary weapons in Ireland, only the IRA has surrendered its stockpile of arms.

Light is any wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, though the word is commonly used to refer to the visible light spectrum. The human eye typically perceives electromagnetic wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers, interpreting them as a range of colors from red to violet. Light is understood to exhibit both particle and wave properties, and the fundamental particle, or quantum, of light is called the photon. Who received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work on this wave-particle duality?