A big search…
…for a little particle has culminated with its discovery.
Maybe:
Signaling a likely end to one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science, physicists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe…
“I think we have it,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, the multinational research center headquartered in Geneva…He and others said that it was too soon to know for sure, however, whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half-century. The particle is predicted to imbue elementary particles with mass. It may be an impostor as yet unknown to physics, perhaps the first of many particles yet to be discovered.
According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass…Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight.
Well, it wouldn’t flow through our hands, exactly, because we wouldn’t exist. But still, I appreciate the NY Times waxing so poetic.
[NOTE: Another Times article on the search manages to inject some politics into the discussion, natch, reminding readers that in 1993 the US canceled the construction of the “superconducting super collider,” which might have found the Higgs boson instead of ceding the glory to CERN. A few people in the comments section of that article waste no time trashing the stupid Republicans of the religious right, as well as Reagan.
Only thing is, who controlled the presidency and Congress in 1993? Why, it was the Democrats (House 258 to 176; Senate 57 to 43). I confess that I paid absolutely no attention to the superconducting super collider’s sad fate at the time, but I’m capable of looking it up, and when I did I found that the project was begun under Reagan and Bush I, and killed under Clinton and the Democratic Congress because of gargantual cost overruns.
Leaving aside the question of whether canceling the collider seemed like a good decision at the time (although it may indeed have), the project died through lack of Democratic support. Clinton had initially been against continuing it, although he’d changed his mind by the time of the Congressional vote. Democratic Texas Governor Ann Richards was against it, and that mattered because it was being built in her state. The drive to kill it in the House was spearheaded by Democratic Kansas Congressman Jim Slattery.
Here’s the story of Reagan’s participation:
On January 29, 1987, at the beginning of the semi-final year of the Reagan Administration, the DOE presented its plan for the new SSC project to the President and his cabinet. The price tag was $4.4 billion, quoted in 1988 dollars omitting inflation and the cost of detectors that the new accelerator would need. After the DOE experts had made their pitch, Reagan recalled his days as a sports reporter interviewing a star quarterback whose watchword had been “Throw deep!” This was the advice he gave the DOE regarding the SSC project.
“Mr. President,” remarked OMB Director William Miller, “you’re going to make a lot of physicists ecstatic.”
“That’s probably fair,” Reagan replied, “because I made two physics teachers in high school very miserable.” With that the SSC received its start.]
you catch them in a lie?
tomorrow the sun rises…
so?
you can spend the rest of your life cataloging the lies from 1880 to now… and when your done, it wont mean anything more than this catch…
how many souls do you save preaching to the choir triumphant about the obvious, and the ignorance of those who will still, regardless of your discovery, vote based on the fake world they live in not the real one based in real facts…
and there are more of them than you think
even more so if you include sympathizers etc.
Artfldgr: well, I was reached by people repeatedly pointing out the lies. And I know for a fact that I have reached some people who had been previously unaware of such things.
How many? Probably exceedingly few, and unquestionably fewer than are needed. But it’s what I can do, and I will continue to do it.
The Anti-Science Democrats did that? Shocking.
Neo, “But it’s what I can do, and I will continue to do it.”
Yes, and you do it exceedingly well. It may seem like a drop in the ocean, but remember the way the ripples spread outward from a pebble in a pond. If we all try to echo your truths and spread them to other parts of the universe, the truth can become as a snowball growing larger as it rolls downhill.
I am sending this tid bit out to all my correspondents, many of whom are “independents.” (At least that’s the way they describe themselves.) It’s not much, but what I can do.
Particle physics is one of the most important fields of human endeavor and it would be amazing to have the standard model further supported by the discovery of the Higgs boson, but I can’t say that I put much stock in anything CERN says about difficult measurements. These are the same jokers, after all, who proudly proclaimed that they had detected faster-than-light neutrinos not too long ago and stuck to their story for some time. CERN pretty much destroyed their reputation and any reason to believe anything that comes out of there with that idiotic fiasco.
i wasnt saying stop, i was saying how bout focusing on the critical things like decisions that are coming up BEFORE they are made, and laws before they are signed, and so on?
McChrystal: Time to bring back the draft
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/07/03/mcchrystal_time_to_bring_back_the_draft
[what a wonderful way to fix a bunch of problems, have a war and feed the problems to it. you can finish off the group targeted as scapegoats, remove a huge amount of welfare potential, jigger bank situations, and so on… cant be thinking of the left and how it loves the boom after the war that gave it power as a good thing to repeat]
“I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn’t be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population,” McChrystal said at a late-night event June 29 at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival. “I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game.”
and just in time after i showed they redesignated womens positions. now, if your drafted what can keep you out? being gay used to keep you from going to war… no? now what? being a woman kept you from draft too… no? now what?
but an almost discovery they are almost sure of at cern, is what you get when you redistribute the wealth from the US to other countries.
ie. wealth is not just money
“We’ve never done that in the United State before; we’ve never fought an extended war with an all- volunteer military. So what it means is you’ve got a very small population that you’re going to and you’re going to it over and over again,” he said. “Because it’s less than one percent of the population… people are very supportive but they don’t have the same connection to it.”
Was Yasser Arafat poisoned? Palestinians ready to exhume body
http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_21005613/was-yasser-arafat-poisoned-palestinians-ready-exhume-body
looks like he might have had a polonium cocktail
(what about others? shows that the old games of moving pieces on the board are still unilaterally being played)
evidence is accumulating that the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be an El Dorado: inch for inch the most valuable and energy rich country anywhere in the world.
Israel and Canada have just signed an agreement to cooperate on the exploration and development of what, apparently, could be vast shale oil reserves beneath the Jewish state.
following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprisingly cordial visit last week, Gazprom and Israel have announced plans to cooperate on gas extraction.
The stakes are not small: the offshore Levantine Basin (which Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Israel and even Gaza will all have some claim to) is believed to have 120 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and “considerable” oil. Drillers working in Israeli waters have already identified what look to be 5 billion barrels of recoverable oil in addition to over a trillion cubic feet of gas. (US firms were involved in these finds.) Israel’s undersea gas reserves are currently estimated at about 16 trillion cubic feet and new fields continue to be rapidly found.
MORE DEMOCRATS BAIL ON OBAMA’S CONVENTION AND REFUSE TO ENDORSE HIM
[they have it in caps – sorry]
http://www.humanevents.com/2012/07/05/more-democrats-bail-on-obamas-convention-and-refuse-to-endorse-him/
new use for emminent domain
California Cities Consider Seizing Mortgages
A handful of local officials in California who say the housing bust is a public blight on their cities may invoke their eminent-domain powers to restructure mortgages as a way to help some borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The municipalities, about 45 minutes east of Los Angeles, would acquire underwater mortgages from investors and cut the loan principal to match the current property value. Then, they would resell the reduced mortgages to new investors.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/05/california-cities-consider-seizing-mortgages/
picking winners and making losers again (fascism)
Feds Pick Firms for Wholesale Home Sell Off
The U.S. government has selected the firms it’s going to sell the first bulk inventory of its foreclosure homes to at wholesale prices. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) quietly announced that the winning bidders of its real estate owned (REO) pilot program had been chosen the day before the Independence Day holiday, but declined to name any of the companies involved.
The government’s housing agency launched the controversial program on a trial basis, selling 2,490 homes to investor groups paying cash for property at rock bottom prices. The move is an effort to unload part of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s surplus inventory of REO foreclosures.
PBS: Re-Educating America’s Schoolchildren, Thanks to Your Contributions
http://www.aim.org/special-report/pbs-re-educating-americas-schoolchildren-thanks-to-your-contributions/
For foundations that donate to CPB, PBS, NPR, or state affiliates, PBS Teachers provides a ready-made platform for advancing their ideas and agendas to those same captive student audiences. George Soros’ combined Open Society Foundations (OSF) has supported National Public Radio and independent projects throughout the CPB universe, including underwriting documentaries used in classrooms to “educate” students on various causes. In 2010, Soros made an additional grant of $1.8 million to NPR’s state government reporting initiative. Other large donors include the Joan B. Kroc estate ($230 million after Kroc’s 2003 death), the U.S. Department of Education, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
By creating primary materials through programming and reporting and then producing syllabi packaged by age group based on those primary materials, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has evolved into perhaps the single most influential voice in the nation’s classrooms, while defending their own taxpayer funding streams by doing so.
progressoverpeace: please provide a quote where CERN “proudly” proclaimed the neutrino result. Before you start throwing ad homs around like “jokers”, do you really understand the work involved in doing such physics??
As I recall the neutrino result was announced, the press ran with it, meanwhile most physicists were extremely skeptical, and it turned out to be what everyone thought: a timing error. That’s how science works. Announce a result and then everyone else try to tear it apart.
I, myself, am not surprised by the Higgs. It’s been in the SM since 1964. The SM, for those mathematically inclined, is based on observed symmetries where the “particles” play the role of the bases of the symmetry group. Whether that symmetry represents a fundamental layer of nature, or something deeper remains to be seen.
Haaretz
Senior IDF Officer: Israel Is Preparing For The Next Lebanon War
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/senior-idf-officer-israel-is-preparing-for-the-next-lebanon-war-1.449126
Six years after the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, the IDF is saying openly that Israel is preparing for another Lebanon war.
“The Goldstone report will pale in comparison to what will be here next time. There is no choice but to fight against the enemy where he is, and that is in the heart of a populated area. “
Found at Transterrestrial Musings:
Brooklyn hipsters try to guess what the Higgs Boson is
Oh, and they just cancelled out your vote.
While we’re on the subject, where did the idiotic term “God particle” come from? As far as I know, no actual physicist uses it, but reporters in the media practically insist on it.
The Democrats are fond of saying, as they conjure up a new freedom-crushing regulation, “If it saves one child from (whatever), it’s worth it.”
I say, keep it up Neo. If it saves one liberal from his close-mindedness, it’s worth it.
in 1993 the US canceled the construction of the “superconducting super collider,” which might have found the Higgs boson instead of ceding the glory to CERN
At the risk of sounding like an anti-science Luddite, I say let CERN have the glory, such as it is, along with the bill. Making the discovery confers no tangible advantage to the nations involved, since the result will be/has been published in the open literature.
I’m kind of allergic to Big Science projects (the superconducting supercollider, and pretty much anything out of NASA) as boondoggles in the making. Interesting boondoggles, but boondoggles nonetheless. If we had lots of money, sure, why not, the stuff is interesting. But we’re broke, and these projects confer no advantage whatever to whoever pays for them.
As a chemist, I find the hundreds of millions spent on such projects aggravating, when PIs in chemistry commonly scratch for grants of a few hundred thousand dollars each that a) could lead to substantial tangible advances here on terra firma, and b) provide training for future scientists.
Big Physics projects, by contrast, provide little in the way of benefit to earthlings (Tang? BFD.), and no training whatever for future physicists. Let’s face it, all of the “physics” grad students involved in such research are really underpaid programmers, machinists, and technicians. The physics content of their labor is de minimis.
physicsguy, surely you don’t already forget that fiasco (am I allowed to use the word “fiasco” without you calling it an ad hominem?)? From CERN’s web releases, the Nov 2011 update reads:
They f#cked up. Big time. It was a joke and they made jokers of themselves (BTW, the head of the OPERA group was sh#tcanned when the loose cables aspect of physics came to be of more interest than the speed of light). Don’t blame me because they did this. This is the sort of result that you don’t present until you’re really, really, really sure that there aren’t any loose cables or anything.
And, BTW, that’s NOT how science works. You don’t come up with an Earth-shattering result and not triple check and quadruple check before you announce it to the world. And my point stands, if that is how they do science at CERN, with results of that magnitude (violations of relativity theory have to be at least a 48.3 on the physics richter scale), then everything they announce is suspect. WIthout knowing anything else about the experiment and measurements I would remain skeptical. It could be that they’re announcing another errant result and, doing science in your estimation, by waiting to see if anyone can refute it (even though no one else has the equipment to run the same test).
BTW, physicsguy, I’m a mathematicsguy (Category Theory) but thanks for the elementary group theory lesson anyway.
progressoverpeace Says:
July 5th, 2012 at 8:28 pm
Oh, now that’s an interesting point.
by waiting to see if anyone can refute it (even though no one else has the equipment to run the same test)
Thank you for reminding me of this further point, that the results of Big Science projects are often virtually impossible to falsify because of the expense involved.
I’m a interested party to particle physics.
But I remember my first reaction to greater-than-light-velocity results was “They Made A Mistake – Somewhere”. General Relativity is just too tested and self-consistent: the burden of proof must lie with whomever/whatever made the “greater than” argument.
Also, large devices like LHC are needed to accurately detect phenomena on this scale…don’t have time or space to go into the reasons why.
As far as my friend and fellow chemist, Occam’s Beard, goes: he’s right, but chemistry operates in entirely different realms. Remember Dirac’s dictum that chemistry is now a matter of applied mathematics.
And what is Artflg doing raving on in this thread? “Brevity is the soul of wit”, Art…
Occam’s Beard Says:
July 5th, 2012 at 8:28 pm
We’ve spent something like $100 billion building the International Space Station. A little background:
The Space Shuttle was developed in the 1970s and it was intended to replace all of our expendable launch vehicles. It was going to make spaceflight cheap and routine.
For its first five years of operation it was used to launch satellites, and some of our older launchers were retired. However, turning what used to be routine satellite launches into manned missions did not make them cheaper.
Then came the Challenger disaster in 1986. The Shuttle program shut down for two years. But we still needed to launch satellites, and the Air Force spearheaded the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program, which led to the development of Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V and Boeing’s Delta IV.
By the time the Shuttle began flying again, the Air Force no longer trusted it to launch important national security payloads. The EELVs took over the majority of satellite launches, and they have had a stellar success rate.
So that left the Shuttle as a vehicle without a mission. The ISS was basically conceived to give the Shuttle something to do and a destination to go to. The Russians had been operating their own space station Mir for a decade or so, and they were pressured to deorbit it and participate in the ISS program instead. They were not happy about that. Mir was the largest and longest-lived space station at the time. It was entirely Russian, and they were justifiably proud of it.
(I’m just writing this off the top of my head, so I trust someone will correct any factual errors. I think the overall gist of it is accurate.)
It took dozens of Shuttle launches to assemble the ISS. Meanwhile, Bigelow Aerospace has developed inflatable habitat modules which could create a space station larger and more capable than the ISS with just a handful of launches at a fraction of the cost. They’ve already successfully orbited two small-scale modules to prove the concept. As I understand it, they’re basically cooling their heels waiting for someone to come up with manned spacecraft to populate it. SpaceX has already successfully flown their Dragon capsule, Boeing is working on their CST-100 capsule, and Sierra Nevada Corp. is developing their Dream Chaser winged shuttle.
Bigelow modules could also be used for early Moon and Mars habitats. Hell, take a Bigelow module, stick a Dragon on one end and an engine on the other, and you practically have an interplanetary spaceship.
“And what is Artflg doing raving on in this thread? “Brevity is the soul of wit”, Art…”
And what the hell does any of what he raved about today have to do with particle physics?
Others have suggested it and I second their motions: Get your own blog, Art. You’re brilliant, I suppose…so take your thoughts to a place where you will have unlimited space for whatever you want to talk about.
When I said, “I am sending this tid bit out to all my correspondents.” I was referring to the bit about “reminding readers that in 1993 the US canceled the construction of the ‘superconducting super collider,’ which might have found the Higgs boson instead of ceding the glory to CERN. A few people in the comments section of that article waste no time trashing the stupid Republicans of the religious right, as well as Reagan.” Followed by the neo’s refuting of same. These are the kinds of distortions of the past that need to be refuted. Bubba Clinton was President and he and his minions cancelled it. Not Reagan or the Rethuglicans.
As for the Higgs boson. It may matter to theoretical physicists and may show something about the creation of the universe. I assume it’s called the God particle because it would prove there was no old man in a white robe running the universe. Or something to that effect. Just to denigrate all the religious fools like me. For me, I could care less at this time. Will it lead to some jobs in the economy? No? Then I don’t care. Yeah, I’m a knuckle dragger.
Oh yeah, here’s the quick gouge on the Higgs boson:
http://tinyurl.com/cxmhgm5
Remember Dirac’s dictum that chemistry is now a matter of applied mathematics.
So, if Dirac had needed a life-saving drug, he could have calculated the structure necessary, and would have been happy to be injected with it without testing?
To stake out an extreme position: applied mathematics can’t answer any question of significant interest in chemistry. If applied mathematics can answer a chemical question, the question itself was trivial, or the answer was known beforehand, and the parameterization and/or basis set massaged to yield the correct result.
But I remember my first reaction to greater-than-light-velocity results was “They Made A Mistake — Somewhere”. General Relativity is just too tested and self-consistent: the burden of proof must lie with whomever/whatever made the “greater than” argument.
Precisely my reaction too. Could be very cool, but the odds are very long against the assertion being correct. Same as the arsenic-based life forms, in both coolness, skepticism, and ultimate validity factors.
I can only agree that high-energy physics just sucks money from much more important and promissory fields like biotechnology and drug research. We are now losing battle to bacterial pathogens. All our widely used antibiotics lost their efficiency due evolving of resistant strains, and no new antibiotic was put on market since 2003. This is simply an outrage. Those who know how miserable life was before discovery of penicillin should be aware that these times can return, and with vengeance, if some drastic measures would not taken right now. Big Farma will not do it, since costs of advancing new drugs on the market are prohibitive. Only government funding of fundamental research at this stage can save the situation.
physicsguy,
“Before you start throwing ad homs around like ‘jokers’, do you really understand the work involved in doing such physics??”
It never ceases to make me wonder, why our gnostic mystery-interpreting class uses so many words to say, “Shut up! Take the truth from your betters only!”
sergey,
“I can only agree that high-energy physics just sucks money from much more important and promissory fields like biotechnology and drug research.”
Or nuclear fusion, which, if there is any reality to AGW, is the best way to solve it. Scientists should do philosophy (searching for answers to origins questions, advocating anti-religious skepticism, etc.) on their own dime; they ought to remember society pays them for discovering means of improving our lives.
Oh, and Artfl: This isn’t a thread about a terrorist who’s dead. For the love of the signal-to-noise ratio and all that’s good, keep on topic at the very least.
For those who remember…
“The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”.
Ultimately that’s what we do (sez Sigmund F.) – derive either pleasure or pain from our physical activities.
So abstract mathematics turns me on. And basic – ie “particle” physics – research.
G.O.C.
PS: BTW – Occam: I did do some quantum chemical calculations for a major cancer center…finding that you could correlate some carcinogenic properties with ring charges in some selected (by them) polyaromatic fused rings.compounds. What good was it? Dunno…
Charlie
texexec:
I suspect – being evil-minded – that Artflg know he won’t attract that many eyeballs on his own turf.
Hence his behavior here,,,very reminiscent of the classical 19th century Germanic “Perfesser”.
Regard, Tex
Big Farma will not do it, since costs of advancing new drugs on the market are prohibitive. Only government funding of fundamental research at this stage can save the situation
Or, government could stop doing some of the things which makes new drug development expensive or reduces the payback.
If art had his onwn blog, do you think he might be somewhat constrained from repetitive posting? Then whatever would he do?
Obama signed 940 plus “Executive Orders”.
He was able to fit those in along with his one hundred-plus games of golf.
That averages 23.5 “Executive Orders” per month, or 5.875 per week
and we never discuss them…
yet the immigration thing was such an order
if you think the health care thing is bad, at least it was opposed and people know it. but this stuff? along with lots of other things… are like moving chess pieces into place and the opponent refuses to look at the arrangement, preferring to fawn over the sculpture quality of the pieces.
Bush signed 288 “Executive Orders” in 96 months, averaging 3 per month
but we didn’t look at them much either.. nor Clinton, nor the whole chain of them going back decades to carter and before…
its a dictatorial power that allows assertion of writs as law and act upon them, and not notice the imperial sovereign democracy (as in russia).
but the cool part is that the smart people haven’t yet figured out that internment camps, exterminations, and all that kind of fun stuff, was done through executive orders… not voted in some power congress.
people have yet to figure out how dictatorships work, and would rather wait till they break out the funny costumes and patches… when dictators, dictate through what kind of order?
your in a dictatorship already, and its unopposed. its freely acting, and only a few out of hundreds of things are noticed at all. and will not be noticed till covered (that is, we are conditioned to negate that which is not first presented in the media)
from asserting protected classes (roberts helped in that one), because when equal, anyone can refuse anyone else!!! ie. if you own a store or an apartment or a business that has employees, equality allows you to select whoever you want or dont want to work for you.
however, under the guise of the more than equal judgment of the supreme court, we now have protected classes. groups that you are not allowed to act equally with.
we discuss it all the time as the special perks and so on, and the legal focus of the state, but no one seems to care as to how this structure with all the other stuff is erected or even works. (till they step on the third rail).
once they made that in the supreme court, that meant that you could remove and ration and impinge any group that was not a protected class. ie. if your not under their wing, your a target and the state legally can take from you to give to them. or force you to hire them. or force you to change your religions tenets.
but no one ever asks how that is legal…
and when or if they do, they assume its under affirmative action, which actually is unconstitutional. (and judged so many times – and even judged so as a thing that the judges have to change later! hows that for freaky principals and bowing to progressive ideology over constitutional doctrine?)
ex soviets and such all sit around wondering how stupid americans can be… and even wonder at how they cant even tell them. that the conditioning they have all their life is experience is not authority, anointedness of the left is. so ex soviets are ignored.. (anyway, most are old and old is out in this new Reich)
we have almost every facet of that power in place, and no one is going to ‘get’ it till they reachthe eli weisel moment, and the costumed critters are running around… but that doesnt happen because thats what you see from OUTSIDE, not inside. inside you have no way to measure, ergo zimbardos discovery that the teacher cant monitor as they become a part of it…
“It never ceases to make me wonder, why our gnostic mystery-interpreting class uses so many words to say, “Shut up! Take the truth from your betters only!”
I never meant it that way. What I resent is the idea that someone is labeled a “joker” by someone else who has never engaged in the type of work the other person is doing… walk a mile in my shoes.. Please continue to question any result on its physical basis, that’s good. Immediately labeling someone a “joker”… how does that help?
Science involves continually making mistakes, trying to find the mistakes, which is really hard when you are dealing with your own errors, and then applying what one hopes is a correction.
Notice how in the quote from CERN progessoverpeace uses CERN says: “inviting scrutiny of their neutrino time-of-flight measurement from the broader particle physics community,” What they are saying is they need help finding the error. What’s wrong with that? How does that make them “jokers”? They are admitting they don’t understand the result.
The unfortunate result that I have seen from the whole AGW circus, (and perhaps overhype by the big labs) is that now all science, and scientists, are now considered to be charlatans, or funding mongers who will do anything, say anything as perceived by a growing number of people. I can understand that reaction when one is being scammed as in AGW. But to come to the idea that the whole system is corrupt is, I believe, wrong.
I can only agree that high-energy physics just sucks money from much more important and promissory fields like biotechnology and drug research. We are now losing battle to bacterial pathogens.
I agree Sergey, thats its point..
and the luddites cant get the point by example, ergo my many posts…
ie. if they cant see that nearly a 1000 signing statements that lock them into a totalitarian state is more important than the god particle, and would rather masturbate (self pleasure) and dont like it when i stop their “emotional masturbatory” fun…
(as aldous huxley referred to it. ie. they are like rats in a cage that get ornery if they dont get their fix or their fix is fouled… they would rather just sit there and h it the lever and read others who cater to them, and like those rats, let the rest of the world slide by till anything can happen. – Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. also aldous)
what else can the end be but such a state?
its not like Aldous Huxley didnt lay out such a social masturbatory existence and distraction… (not like the complainers would read such either).
not like the complainers would find out that his brother helped establish the UN and a track for one world socialist government and eventually agenda 21 (which Alabama now is making laws against!)
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. Aldous Huxley
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen. Aldous Huxley
too foolish to imagine what the people warning others of Hitler or Stalin must have appeared as prior to full power…
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Huxley
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Utopian Socialism
http://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/index.htm
Utopia — literally “nowheresville” — was the name of an imaginary republic described by Thomas More in which all social conflict and distress has been overcome.
Full text of A Modern Utopia, H.G. Wells (1905)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hgwells/1905/modern-utopia/index.htm
Dystopian visions are used to issue warnings about dangers within society or to demonstrate the absurdity of the dominant ideology of the day by following the idea through to its “logical conclusion.”
now.. not saying the stuff that is unpleasant is how you get a dystopia. ie. their whining for entertainment is the public whining for bread and circuses, and not living… the result is dystopia.
the endless persuit of pleasure as a life goal, is exactly what was described as the key ingredient in the fall of rome and others…
Dystopian novels appeared throughout the twentieth century. Among these are The Iron Heel (1907) by Jack London, My (1924) and We (1925) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) by George Orwell. The concept of Dystopia is a frequent theme for movies such as Matrix, Mad Max, etc.
and the marxists take:
It is said people today find it easier to imagine a global disaster than any real improvement in social conditions, let alone Utopia. So, Dystopia is an effective ideological weapon, while the postmodern distrust of progress makes Utopias unconvincing to most people in modern capitalist societies. This was not always the case however, and Utopian visions have been powerful levers for action in the past.
so sad… eh? that by searching for nothing but pleasure, you forget to learn about the darker side of things… and so, never realize that without that search, the darker things would not be possible.
ie. the more they seek self pleasure and censor according to that, the less they know reality, the less they believe the negative, and the more annoyed they are like a stoner who is complaining their buzz is being ruined… (ie. they want to go back to sleep)
[edited for length by n-n]
Christopher Hitchens has commented on god and the god particle… and on what i bring up…
Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article “Why Americans Are Not Taught History”:
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression “You’re history” as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself.
By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus.
Orwell’s was a house of horrors.
He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion.
[The Soviet Union, art.]
Whereas Huxley … rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend.
In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works.
This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction.
For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.
Good Ole Charlie said:
“texexec:
I suspect — being evil-minded — that Artflg know he won’t attract that many eyeballs on his own turf.”
How many eyeballs does he attract here? I never read his stuff and it’s wearing out the center button on my mouse.
raf Says:
July 6th, 2012 at 10:31 am
“If art had his onwn blog, do you think he might be somewhat constrained from repetitive posting? Then whatever would he do?”
I’m beginning to suspect that he’s on commission with Logitech to replace computer mice with worn out center buttons.
Occam: I did do some quantum chemical calculations for a major cancer center…finding that you could correlate some carcinogenic properties with ring charges in some selected (by them) polyaromatic fused rings.compounds. What good was it?
Charlie, I have no doubt your calculations were highly valuable to them as a potential (no pun intended) means of predicting carcinogenicity in other polyaromatic fused ring compounds, and perhaps other more distantly related ones. No quibble there.
The quibble with Dirac’s aphorism lies in its implicit assertion that applied mathematics can obviate the need for experimental work in the laboratory.
And that’s patent nonsense. To extend the carcinogenicity point, Dirac’s comment in essence asserts that calculation could not only rationalize carcinogenicity trends in a series of related compounds, but could predict which compound – of any structure whatever – would be most carcinogenic, and to what target organ.
(I once had a similar conversation with a colleague at our former shared academic domicile who had made a Diracian (?) assertion. I disingenuously asked him to calculate the redox potential in solution of a new complex I’d just synthesized. He said he couldn’t deal with solvation energies, one of the largest terms. Point made.)
I seem to recall that the “super-collider” planned for Texas was not as large as CERN. If that’s accurate, it would seem to me, from my non-science perspective, that it was more likely that the Higgs boson was more likely to have been discovered at CERN than at a smaller super-collider. Anyone out there who knows about this stuff?
Occam,
“The quibble with Dirac’s aphorism lies in its implicit assertion that applied mathematics can obviate the need for experimental work in the laboratory.”
Agree completely. In fact, I would take it a step further with regard to the Standard Model (at least in places like CERN they are actually doing some experimental work). I think in the case of the SM, people are letting the math be too much of a driver. What convinced me was a seminar way back in my early grad days. A theoretician gave a talk on “particles” and symmetry groups. He developed a complete description of a system he showed had certain time/space symmetries. He then asked do we understand this system? The punch line was that the system he used was the solar system planetary motions. Nowhere is this “complete group theory description” was there any indication of the actual physical structure we know about. I think we may be confusing cause and effect when approaching nature on a purely symmetry/math basis.
Of course there’s still the problem of where Gen Rel fits in and those pesky neutrino masses.
physicsguy:
An interesting speculation is based on stuff in Griffiths’ 2nd edition of “Introduction to Elementary Particles”…about neutrino oscillations (new chapter) and higgs boson.
I’m still working my way through an infamous Chapter 11 on these subjects.
However, the next experimental issue is whether Higgs is a Pseudoscalar (Spin = 0) or a Vector (S = 1) Boson.
You pays your money and takes yer choice…I think spin one means more “Higgs Bosons” ahead…with different “masses”.
Exciting Times
I’m a former particle physics guy. If I remember correctly, Leon Lederman named the Higgs the God Particle. He’s on record regretting the name.
I do not see what is wrong with reminding us that while we sing to the choir to blow off steam, it is important to discover what can be done before something new and awful is done.
To hear the rate of BO’s EOs (almot 6/week) comared with Bush’s EOs (3/mo) is sobering. It made me find this list http://1461days.blogspot.com/2009/01/current-list-of-president-obamas.html Here is a list of what someone thought were the worst ones http://www.westernjournalism.com/a-comprehensive-list-of-obamas-worst-executive-orders/
this is still singing to the choir – I do not know how to stop the awful next thing the Press and the politician will do. what can we do except try gently to convert a lost soul, one by one by one.
Occam, of course nothing can eliminate need to do real chemical experiments. But the number of possible configurations of organic molecules is practically infinite, just as possible ways to create them. So experiments in silico are much cheaper than in vitro. Clever algorithms vastly speed up research and focus it on promissory compounds and ways to obtain them. While each such é«xperiment” can be trivial, if you can obtain 10000 these results in a day, it will make unnecessary years of random search in chem laboratory.
Sergey, absolutely right. But that relegates calculational methods to useful tools – their proper role, IMO – rather than drivers of the bus.
Nowhere is this “complete group theory description” was there any indication of the actual physical structure we know about. I think we may be confusing cause and effect when approaching nature on a purely symmetry/math basis.
Physicsguy, I’ve thought this, but wondered if it were because I’ve got physical (and spatial) intuition, but essentially no mathematical intuition. When I was first introduced to line integrals in a math lecture, they made little sense to me. An hour later, in a physics lecture, the lecturer used line integrals to calculate the work done when a charged particle was moved in an electric field. THAT made perfect sense; I needed the physical model. Then I was happy.
The level of abstraction on which theoretical physics works now is way beyond any physical structure. Probably, it will be more appropriate to call it not physics, but metaphysics. And we certainly do not have now a serious, rational metaphysics. The two pillars of modern physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, are simply not compatible. Some genius of caliber of Newton, Kant or Einstein is needed to reconcile them. He probably was not born yet.
I posted the following comment and question, above: I seem to recall that the “super-collider” planned for Texas was not as large as CERN. If that’s accurate, it would seem to me, from my non-science perspective, that it was more likely that the Higgs boson was more likely to have been discovered at CERN than at a smaller super-collider. Anyone out there who knows about this stuff?
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My question, above, appears to have been answered. However, my recollection was backwards. The super-collider planned for Texas was far larger than the CERN. According to the author of the article, linked below, if the Texas collider project had been completed, as planned, during the 1990s, the U.S. would have found the Higgs boson some seven to ten years ago.
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2012/07/09/us_could_have_found_higgs_boson_10_years_ago_106319.html