Six years of obsessive forensics challenges some of the Titanic disaster’s favorite myths

If Maltin is right, the Titanic wasn’t just outmatched by an iceberg, but by one of nature’s nastier visual hacks: an atmospheric mirage that turned reality into unreliable software.

For more than a century, the Titanic has generated the kind of mythmaking normally reserved for Elvis sightings and alien autopsies, but historian Tim Maltin has spent years doing the profoundly unglamorous work of reading testimony, ship logs, and survivor accounts to argue that physics, not just hubris, helped script the disaster.