Living in the future!
It’s about time we started pulling our futuristic weight. Here we are, 2009. No flying cars, no cities on clouds, no food in pill form. No better future awaits us on the off world colonies. Not even armies of Robot slaves to rise up against our greedy decadent ways! I think it’s about time we started acting like we lived in the year two thousand nine dammit. Hopefully Cern and Popular science can lead us there.
In 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert published a paper noting a pretty amazing side effect to Einstein’s relativity: a relativistic particle moving faster than about half the speed of light should be repelled by a stationary mass (or at least it would appear to be repelled, to an inertial observer watching from afar). Read more here.
Popular Science, October 10 2009.
War on terror now extends to expanding scientific frontiers.
The 32-year-old man of Algerian descent was one of two brothers detained in the south-east town of Vienne on Thursday.Police believe they had been in contact over the internet with people linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and had been planning attacks in France. Read more here.
BBC news, October 9 2009.
French judicial officials have said the suspect has acknowledged that he corresponded online with the group and vaguely discussed plans for terror attacks. In line with French judicial policy, he has not been identified. Read more here.
New York Times, October 12 2009
Dr. Hicheur has not been charged with a crime, and the French authorities have not said what evidence they have in the case. A person informed of the investigation said that some incriminating information was in the form of e-mail messages and other communications obtained at the time of Dr. Hicheur’s arrest. Read more here.
New York Times, October 13 2009.
The Swiss seem to do everything beautifully.
Under French law, filing preliminary charges gives police time to carry out further investigations before deciding whether to send a suspect for trial or drop the case. Read more here.
World Radio Switzerland, October 13 2009.
And today details of the ‘brilliant and solitary’ physician’s sinister plans were made public by security sources who have been collecting evidence against him for the past year-and-a-half during a surveillance operation. Read more here.
Mail Online, October 14 2009.
God Fearing Man
One of the things that I really like about the scale and scope of what is happening at CERN is that the experiment and the size of the science means that it gets bent out of subject and starts to be religion and philosophy and a bunch of other things. The magnitude of the ideas, and what it takes to understand them, even a fraction of them is immense. So much that it transcends mere science and brushes other schools of thought, turning it into a new thing. Here is such a thing.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail to Overbye. In an unpublished essay, Overbye relates, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Read more here.
Reuters blog, October 13 2009.
Whew! Science man. It’s big. I think we’ve all earned some the Clash.
Armstrong Effect 