In a brief Wired report on the 31st International Conference on High Energy Physics which opens Wednesday in Amsterdam, the reporter ~ Diana Michele Yap ~ delivers herself of the following paragraph:

Every now and then, published pure research spins off into moneymaking products for everyday life, or technology for military weapons. It would be interesting to determine what fraction of this furthering of horizons of conscious knowledge is applicable to humanity's practical needs, as defined by a given government. Not many poets get bread from the federal Department of Energy. America's national science labs do.

This strikes me as the lamest form of editorial aside. In fact, the article contains several other examples of this snide attitude. Does it add anything to the value of the piece? I certainly didn't think so. I've got nothing against a well-informed coherent critique of any field, or any program of government spending. But I don't think this qualifies.

How about you?

4:24:18 PM    please comment []

I love cosmology. In my view, only a person without imagination could fail to be inspired, filled with wonder, and tantalized by the pictures we try to build of the origins and fate of the universe.

The latest twist in the cosmology story is the putative presence of "dark energy" ~ which, although not in any way directly observed, is required to explain current observations that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding in an accelerating fashion.

If the idea of an infinitely cold and dark future for the universe is too depressing, then check out the current theory of "branes" (from membranes) which is an offshoot of string theory. Our universe may be just one brane floating in a multi-dimensional space with many others ~ and the occasional collisions or gravitational interactions could be what sparks the next Big Bang.

Gosh!

We sure don't know. But astronomy and the ever more fabulous telescopes we have here on earth and in space are essentially the poor man's particle accelerator, allowing us to look back into the past when exotic conditions prevailed, and providing us with ever more strange phenomena to try to account for.

Read more about it in this New York Times article.

4:00:36 PM    please comment []