Comment Most people struggle... (Score 1) 202
People think I'm making stuff up when I repeat this immortal quote from the story...
"..they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."
People think I'm making stuff up when I repeat this immortal quote from the story...
"..they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."
Yes, but surely the point is that the stuff that Cameron's been doing is in a whole different league to Galileo slapping together a couple of lenses and discovering that the moons of Jupiter go around in circles or just sitting down and thinking about a cage of insects buzzing about in a box on board a ship.
In physics it's pretty much the case that all the low hanging fruit has been picked. The experimental stuff takes large amounts of money. The purely theoretical stuff gets picked over by an army of professional thinkers every day. If there were any obvious flaws in relativity or quantum mechanics then it's almost certain that someone would have spotted them by now. I'm not saying that there's never going to be another paradigm shift - but it isn't going to happen by way of some amateur demonstrating that, say, GR is invalid by watching a pendulum swinging in the back yard.. In fact, any serious advance in physics will probably be driven by experimental results - and these are expensive to produce.
The moral panic that broken out in the news lately would be funny if it wasn't so fucking frightening. But mainly though it pisses me off that all of this 'think of the children' bullshit or vague allusions to stopping terrorists passes unchallenged most of the time.
Behold this master plan by the Andrea Leadsom and the Mothers Union to stop teenagers looking at porn http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17826515 Good luck with that! But while it's not going to work, it's a great excuse to get some extra control of the internet.
And yesterday, no less a person than the Deputy Childrens Commissioner for England was making the case for mobile interet censorship on the grounds that... and I'm not making this up... children in London routinely expect to be gang raped for hours in public parks by teenagers who've been watching porn on their phones. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18422204
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db