“There is no guarantee that the ship will reach Zyra, but those to make the flight will be chosen by lots sometime before the worlds collide.” – When Worlds Collide
Everyone’s a gangsta . . . until the room glows blue. (look up Demon Core if this is unfamiliar)
My first love was physics in high school. To my young and naïve mind, it seemed the way that I could best contribute to the world – discover something new that would allow mankind to do things it had never done before: conquer time via time travel, or conquer space via translight speeds, or conquer the hangover.
I don’t know, but I thought I could figure some way to leave my mark in history. The beginning of the Universe was certainly attractive, since what high school guy doesn’t like the sound of a Big Bang? I thus entered college as a physics major.
I came to my senses when I realized I could gain most of the benefits of an education in theoretical physics by beating up physics students, taking their money, and buying myself something nice.
Is the guy working the cash register at KFC® the Chicken Tender?
I was thinking about physics tonight when I clicked on a video from the YouTube™ channel Cool Worlds® by Professor David Kipping who has a day job teaching physics at Columbia. My parents even wanted me to go to Columbia for college, but I was smarter than them, and stayed in the United States.
Generally, Doctor Kipping’s videos are interesting, and I give the occasional video a look, with one of the more fascinating ones being the one on Przybylski’s (did a cat walk across the keyboard to come up with that name?) Star which has weird elements in it that might be an alien technosignature. The biggest mystery, though, is if Przybylski’s last name resulted from his father not being able to buy a vowel on Wheel of Fortune™ or if the family cat walked over their typewriter and them saying, “Przybylski? Why not?”
This latest video, though, was titled In Defense of Science. Since it was a short video and I had yet to finish taking my Macanudo® down to the wrapper, I tossed clicked the “go” arrow.
Dr. Frankenstein entered a bodybuilding contest, but seriously misunderstood the objective.
I am a fan of science, especially physics, which has revealed so much about the world so as to be second to no other science in its ability to predict amazing things, like nuclear weapons and the famed Anti-PEZ™ particle.
In this video, however, Kipping is kinda mad because he’s bound and determined to defend the most sacred thing he can: his funding. To be fair, he says that his bacon-wrapped-shrimp parties are in danger if funding is cut, but then he jumps into a series of arguments that were the verbal equivalent of throwing a plate of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.
Again, I like this guy. He’s a good communicator, and obviously smart and in good shape because no one has yet beaten him up and taken his money to buy themselves something nice. But . . .
He makes the argument that basic science research in physics is important in itself. Well, yeah. Mostly.
But let’s look at the Future Circular Collider® (FCC), which is the planned follow-up to the Large Hadron Collider. The FCC is projected to be 56.5 miles in diameter, with a 16 foot (3 electronVolts) diameter chamber built at an average depth of 656 feet (3 meters) underground. As a person who regularly looks at infrastructure, and goes, “Well why the hell didn’t they make that BIGGER?” I can appreciate the idea.
I’m warning you, don’t do it.
However, just like Kathleen Turner, not all things are better if they’re bigger, though I do think she should form a 1970s tribute band named Kathleen Turner Overdrive. And she should also avoid ham sandwiches in order to stop her mass from disturbing sensitive gravity experiments.
What will this Future Circular Collider™ do at a cost of $16 billion (and if you believe that number won’t triple, you’ll believe the Vaxx© was Safe and Effective™) when it comes online in 2050 or 2060? It will give . . . drumroll . . . a slightly better value for the mass of the Higgs boson.
Yup.
Oh, and it’s likely that other experiments using linear colliders will probably get there sooner and cheaper.
Saturn, though, is the Solar System’s undefeated Hula Hoop™ champ.
But this is Wednesday, and this is the day of economics, and this is the day when we learn that people who have physics degrees and work on the public’s dime at Ivy League® universities rarely have more economic sense than, “beware of that guy, he might beat me up and take my money and buy himself something nice.”
Kipping’s next argument?
“These increase economic activity by a factor of $3 for every $1 spent.” As we’ve discussed recently, this is the broken windows fallacy (link below). You could have given that money to people visiting whorehouses, and they would increase “economic activity”. Now, admittedly, they’re not like Ivy League professors who buy BMWs® and ludicrously expensive bicycles to save 0.3 pounds (15 grahamcrackers), but, you know, at least the whores are honest about what they’re selling.
The French, Broken Windows, And The Intentional Destruction Of Wealth
But NASA is different, right? NASA was once the envy of the scientific and engineering world, but it has been infected with people who remote work and do PowerPoints© on how gender is fluid in orbit and that girl testicles need to be protected in space. These are the same people that wanted to rename the James Webb Space Telescope because James Webb owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. No, wait, James Webb’s sin is that he didn’t tattoo a PriDe FlaG on his buttocks. In 1963.
Hell, the woke people at NASA would even try to rename gravity if they found Newton’s Ye Olde Tweetes. “Leibniz, thou art poore at the mathematical artes and thou art desirous of the companie of other men in a decidedly unfraternal fashion.”
Even Jeff Bezos is better than NASA now, having sent Katy Perry into space so that she could experience zero gravity with the first all-female crew. Notice that there was nothing they could do, since they had about as much control over the ride into space as Johnny Depp did when he got on the Pirates of the Caribbean™ ride. But, hey, Katy got to say that these women would (and I’m not making this up) “put the ass in astronaut.”
You might not want to Google® her, either. Drunk wine aunt territory in 2025.
But back to the main point: economic activity is only useful if it expands human knowledge or creates additional productive capacity. That’s it. NASA really does do some great planetary science, but they could likely do that same science with half the staff. Kipping waxes on that this is the “building the cathedral” part of society – the fruits of basic research may not even be usable for decades or hundreds of years. But we don’t need chief diversity officers to do that, we need scientists and engineers.
And, we don’t need to understand absolutely everything before we make use of it. We were boiling water and making steam engines long before we’d figured out thermodynamics, and as a professor of mine noted, “Wilder, if we had waited until we understood the cantilever beam before we built houses, we’d still be living in caves.”
I am still in favor of science.
But it has to be kept in balance with economics so we have a strong economy. Why? Because otherwise, the physicists won’t have any money to give you when you beat them up.
Then how will you buy yourself something nice?
Thanks for the reference to the demon core, hadn’t heard of it before.
So in retrospect, Daghlian sucked at Jenga and Slotin at Operation.
Hahaha! I love it.
Other than Tang™, what did NASA produce? Maybe Velcro®? Kubrick’s masterpiece “Apollo 11”?
Loved HS physics too, made an A. Sophomore year, took Physics 101, barely scraped up a D. Changed my major to Finance the following semester.
https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2018/09/how-government-helped-spur-microchip-industry
I always hated Tang but loved those Space Food Sticks. They were a hit when I was in elementary school and were a weird mix of peanut butter and chocolate and probably one of the first “energy bars”. Supposedly the astronauts ate them (or something similar) while on the flight.
J-Bird
Oh, lots of things. But we were serious about science then.
There were so many commercial applications (at least potential ones), that NASA published a monthly glossy print magazine called (IRRC): “NASA Tech Briefs”, just to let folks know about them. It was chock full of articles describing all the stuff our jillions of tax dollars were doing while they were at work. Or something like that.
In fact, the modern descendent of that magazine is now a website called ‘www.techbriefs.com’ – but since NASA isn’t quite as ‘focused’ on doing ‘Space Stuff’ as it used to be – this (purportedly) covers results from all government funded research. Interesting stuff.
“I’m warning you, don’t do it.” I didn’t listen. I did it. OMG. I had no idea.
Well, at least he faced the consequences . . .
“…sensitive gravity experiments”. LOL.
As for Katy being an astronaut…she isn’t.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14613373/Katy-Perry-Lauren-Sanchez-NOT-astronauts.html
Regarding a next gen particle accelerator, cue Sabine and her video from this week, where in the first 40 seconds she drops an F-bomb against her particle physicist critics and only gets more wound up from there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqoyTSAF5g0
Trump and DOGE are getting ready to lower the boom on Federal science spending on the upcoming budget. One story says they’re about to ground the Roman Space Telescope (named for a woman who was the so-called “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)”, not the Italian city) which is sitting in a storage facility ready for launch as an incredibly more powerful replacement for the 35 year old (!!!) HST and its aging 1980s tech. Aurgh. Can’t they instead plop the International Space Station into the Pacific where it belongs before it literally blows a gasket and kills everybody onboard from air loss and also ground the stupidly wasteful SLS booster before it French fries the Artemis 2 crew with a defective heat shield they are too embarrassed to fix?
https://www.adastraspace.com/p/iss-air-leaks-2030
https://www.adastraspace.com/p/artemis-ii-orion-heat-shield-root-cause
It’s tough times for science because it’s tough times for everything. But physics is always cool and somebody is gonna do it. If we’re smart, that will include us. As in the United States.
But they did test the impact of Botox and implants in microgravity.
Too bad they didn’t leave them up in space. Especially Perry.
It did give her a chance to look down on us. Oh, wait, she does that every day.
Katy Perry taking selfies in space. Kathleen Turner taking up too much space. What is this world coming to?
Is it just my imagination, or are females becoming increasingly ridiculous and laughable with their clueless forays into traditional male territory? Landing Delta jets upside down. Crashing navy ships into commercial fishing boats because Captain and XO aren’t on speaking terms. Pushing themselves right out the door by prioritizing DEI over Construimus, Batuimus. Dooming a flight as helo pilot after spending the last two years acting affirmatively in the Biden White House rather than gripping the stick (heh).
They’re even getting the snot beaten out of them by other “women” (the ones with five o’clock shadow) in sports arenas.
Maybe find another line of work, ladies. I hear that kitchens and nurseries are looking for a few good women.
They are. Hubris, brought about by misplaced empathy. But that’s Friday’s post.
The most delightful part of the Girl-Boss spaceflight was seeing the control room where the actual piloting of the craft took place and the room was full of White guys.
Yup. It was an expensive version of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
“Scientists shouldn’t f**k around with things they don’t understand. Including hand tools. At least not until it’s safe for retarded technicians.” – Louis Slotin
Exactly. Slotin should have left it to someone competent. Plus point – he did pay the biggest price.
I read about the unfortunate scientist that had his screwdriver slip. I’m thinking his reaction was much more severe than mine after marring the paint on my mower while replacing a deck tension spring.
I’ve heard that much of the money in question for university grants is toward scientific research, which makes me wonder why kicking out a few trannies, and Nazi’s, is such a big deal. Either they’re more important than the science, or the universities are being run be trannies and Nazis.
It is. That’s the focus of their science.
Remember that old US Superconducting Supercollider? When the site selection was wide open, all of the physicists thought that it was a Fine Idea. As the site selection got tighter, doubts grew. By the time they decided to put it in Texas, only the Texans thought it was still a good idea (and they probably would have disparaged it, if it was sited in Illinois). So, it never got built. Started digging, I think, but not built.
Lathechuck
They dug ***14 MILES*** of main tunnel and 17 access shafts before cancellation.
https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/super-collider-tunnel-digging.gif
Now what could you do today (or what secretly has been done?) with 14 miles of tunnel? Hmmmm….
Yup. It was stopped (at least partly) due to ants.
Can you imagine in the astronauts of Apollo 11 behaved like the women of Blue Origin???
I can just see Neil Armstrong stopping on the ladder just before his first step on the moon, so that he can get a glamour pose in, complete with that sexy lookback over the shoulder complete with pouty lips. Before he takes that last step, he asks Buzz “Does this spacesuit make my ass look too big? ” at which point Buzz chastises him for hogging the spotlight. Accusations fly eventually culminating in Neil calling Buzz fat because of all of the low-gravity induced fluid retention. After a few minutes and some crying from both parties, they apologize to each other, hug, and proclaim that they would remain “besties forever”.
Meanwhile, Mike Collins is frantically searching the orbiter because he can’t find this months issue of Cosmo. He had started taking this month’s “better sex in bed” quiz but Buzz had stolen his magazine before the lunar lander had separated. Fortunately, Mike had stashed away a quart of ice cream in his personal belongs so he begins to eat it straight from the carton in order to drown his sorrows.
J-Bird
And then they stopped talking to each other and Mission Control.
The FCC would not even be up and running until 2070 under current plans. As Nature describes it, “The technologies to reach such energies aren’t ready yet. So the plan is to dig the tunnel and insert a simpler machine that, starting around 2045, would collide electrons and their antiparticles, called positrons (see ‘CERN’s plan for a mega-collider’). This interim collider would produce and study copious numbers of elementary particles known as Higgs bosons to understand their pivotal role in nature. Later, this ‘Higgs factory’ would be dismantled.” And there are doubts within the physics community that even after wasting 50 years and billions of dollars, it might not answer the questions it was intended to answer. The same Nature article cites scientists saying that a linear accelerator that costs half as much could do everything the proposed interim collider could do and more. But, the article points out, “For many physicists, one persuasive argument for the FCC is that it can continue to support the large community of 15,000 researchers and support staff that has grown around the LHC experiments.”
It’s UBI for nerds.
Make fun of the French all you want. They will have a revolution before we do. Say what you want, they have a culture they love…even the young. We have 50% youth that want to be black or homo, or both. We’ll sèe how that plays out in the hard times coming soon.
Agreed. The Muzz “banilieux”(sp?, aka outlier Arrondissements surrounding Paree), might get nixed out by La Grande Armee if push comes to shove. And the Drug Traders in Marsielles will accomplish the same.
Ribbit, Ribbit as Tommy Smothers said.
They don’t really have a good track record with those revolutions . . .