" You probably know what Sherlock Holmes had to say about inference, the most famous thing he ever said that wasn’t “Elementary!”: “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Doesn’t that sound cool, reasonable, indisputable? But it doesn’t tell the whole story. What Sherlock Holmes should have said was: “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn’t occur to you to consider.” Less pithy, more correct. The "

― Jordan Ellenberg , How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking