The LHC paranoia is so stupid it’s staggering. If slamming a few protons together is going to end the universe, then explain the existence of stars. Hmm? Don’t stars slam particles together at billions of electron volts?
kid bitzersays
nah, the pissed off part is a perfectly acceptable side-effect of following promising leads, but it is not a very good proxy for finding them.
people get pissed off for irrational reasons. it is not a good idea to do what irrational people say, or the opposite of what they say, either, and for the same reason.
so if you are not pissing people off, it may be because you are being too tame or conventional. but it may also be because you are doing exactly the right thing, following the right questions and projects, and their irrational piss-generators are just having a day off as part of their normal, irrational, non-truth-governed way.
the anger of the ignorant is no better of a green light than it is a red light.
ignoring it all together, however, is probably a good idea.
Nick Taciksays
Change the 1859 one to 2008 and it still works.
Alex Besogonovsays
Kobra:
Energies at the center of our Sun are about 1000 times _weaker_ than during proton-proton collisions at LHC.
Only a little bit OT, the readership of this blog are great for crashing polls; and I think the poll at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10103521/ on “let’s keep ‘In God We Trust'” is badly in need of being crashed.
Active galaxy NGC 1275 is the central, dominant member of the large and relatively nearby Perseus Cluster of Galaxies. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission, NGC 1275 accretes matter as entire galaxies fall into it, ultimately feeding a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core.
Michellesays
You know, you can’t help but agree with that comic.
robsays
i like it.
for some reason it reminded me of Bill Murray (i think) in the Ghostbusters:
“Back off man, I’m a scientist!”
cthellissays
Luna, that one was already posted earlier. It also has WAYYYY too many respondents to “crash.”
flabbergastedsays
sometimes i want to explain science to people in a friendly engaging manner. one that prods them into thinking and learning and relishing the natural wonder of the universe. you know, kinda like Carl Sagan.
then again, other times i want to explain it like Sam Kinnison. you know:
Ahhhhh!!! AAAAHHH! AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! you f***ing moron!!! black holes aren’t caused by dinosaurs and cro magnons interbreeding on the ark!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Chesays
Are people really protesting the LHC?
Luna_the_catsays
@cthellis — Ah, drat. Sorry for that then, and thanks for the heads-up. I suppose I should have known.
JoJosays
Are people really protesting the LHC?
PETH (People for the Ethical Treatment of Hadrons) is leading the protests. “Don’t fark with the quark!”
Seriously, there are people protesting the LHC. Here’s a website of LHC protesters.
Physicalistsays
@ Luna-the-cat & cthellis: Actually the poll was Pharyngulated for a while. However, it seems that other denizens of the internet, including lots of wingnuts started crashing too. Rather interesting current flurry on a poll that’s three years old.
Given the total number of votes that’s over six million, I’m pretty sure that some folks have voted more than once.
LisaJsays
ha, this is awesome. I love the message at the end there too.
But PZ… if you piss framers off by presenting the unvarnished facts, they won’t be able to protect everyone from the horrible realities foisted upon them by the scientific process.
dahansays
Yet another thing that binds the arts and sciences. “If you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doin’ it right.” Perfect.
P.S. I am SO pumped about the LHC no matter what it finds, or doesn’t! :)
If you ain’t making waves you ain’t kicking hard enough
Azkyrothsays
I suggest we build a Large Moron Collider. Fire stupid paranoid people like the ones protesting the LHC into each other at relativistic velocities and see if the impact generates a black hole of Teh St00pid as well as poetic justice.
And semi-OT, I wasn’t around because I’ve been the whole afternoon aghast at the stupidest religious pareidolia ever: People worshipping a Jesus-shaped dog piss stain.
Azkyroth at #36 said:
“I suggest we build a Large Moron Collider. Fire stupid paranoid people like the ones protesting the LHC into each other at relativistic velocities and see if the impact generates a black hole of Teh St00pid as well as poetic justice.”
No! You fool! There are some kinds of knowledge Man was not meant to have!
Colliding a creationist and new-age antivaxxer at high velocities could produce an entity called a “strangenut”. This could devastate the country, turning it into land of bloated, unreasoning, credulous, passive, ignorant…Ah shit.
Sleeping at the Consolesays
To be pissed off about new knowledge and wisdom… no, it just doesn’t work for me. I’m always delighted when I read about another scientific breakthrough.
I guess people who are pissed off about science are those who realise that science is an ever progressing process that will change and improve our worldview, and therefore a threat to their own dogma that can’t change because then God is wrong and therefore no longer an authority with which to scare and intimidate people.
Wowbaggersays
While it’s possible to be atheist without the benefits of science – I was happily without a need for a god well before anyone explained evolution to me – it does help that it’s making it harder and harder for the religulous to claim their antiquated ooga-booga has merit on any level.
Mind you, as long as there’s a single gap in a body of knowledge they’ll be fighting to cram their diminishing sky-daddy into it.
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Conflict: If it isn’t happening, nothing’s getting done.
H.C.says
Sorry guys, you are simply ignorant. I am sceptical about the LHC, mainly because of the fermi paradox. There is a reason why no intelligent life spread through the cosmos up to now, and a necessary experiment with unexpected results might be it. I have heard only two valid arguments : (1) the theory that predicts that something can happen also predicts nothing will happen. This can be countered with the remark that we know the theory is incomplete and (2) if venus where inhabitable, which in another setting somehow somewhere must be, we would be colonizing it, which invalidates the disaster-experiment explanation.
Call it being a sceptic : I can be convinced by arguments, but never by popular vote, even in a minority group.
I would gladly pay more taxes to have this LHC stuff running at L2 in outer space, with no gravitational bound to earth.
Nick Gottssays
There is a reason why no intelligent life spread through the cosmos up to now, and a necessary experiment with unexpected results might be it.
Nah. Every technological civilisation discovers capitalism, which destroys its environmental support systems before it can get round to sending out von Neumann probes.
JoJosays
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
While the quote from The Third Man is pithy, it doesn’t actually reflect reality. In the 14th and 15th Centuries the Swiss spent a good bit of time gaining and keeping their independence from the Habsburgs (Battle of Sempach 1386, Battle of Näfels 1388), Charles the Bold of Burgundy (Battle of Grandson 1476), and the Holy Roman Empire (Swabian War 1499). After the Burgundian War, the Swiss Reisläufer had the reputation of being the best infantry in Europe.
Swiss mercenaries were highly regarded and commonly employed for centuries. Until the French Revolution, Swiss mercenaries were an elite part of the French army. Napoleon’s army also included Swiss troops, who fought well, and were allowed to keep their distinctive red uniforms (distinguishing them from French troops, who wore blue), although this caused some confusion on the battlefield — it was the same color worn by Napoleon’s enemies in the Spanish campaigns, the British infantry. Swiss mercenaries also fought for Spain and Austria. They were found on both sides of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The last remnant of the Swiss mercenary regiments are the Papal Swiss Guard.
Switzerland itself may have been peaceful. The Swiss were not.
David Marjanović, OMsays
Sorry guys, you are simply ignorant. I am sceptical about the LHC, mainly because of the fermi paradox. There is a reason why no intelligent life spread through the cosmos up to now, and a necessary experiment with unexpected results might be it.
You have no right to not have read comment 6, clicked on the first link, and read that whole page. Thus, the chutzpa with which you defend your ignorance is beyond words, even though you haven’t even noticed that this is what you’re doing.
It is evil to comment on a thread without having read all previous comments.
So why isn’t there intelligent life all over the cosmos? Have you read the book Rare Earth (Peter Ward & Donald Brownlee, IIRC 1997, Copernicus/Springer)? Life is probably very common out there — but intelligent life is extremely rare, because a long list of rare events is required for its evolution and against its immediate extinction. Maybe we really are alone.
This can be countered with the remark that we know the theory is incomplete
But if it were incomplete in that particular way, black holes would be produced in the air all the time. See above.
if venus where inhabitable, which in another setting somehow somewhere must be, we would be colonizing it, which invalidates the disaster-experiment explanation.
I don’t understand that. Could you explain it again?
———————-
Switzerland itself may have been peaceful.
Switzerland in its modern borders wasn’t. The imperialistic canton of Berne against Savoy, Revolution of Vaud against Berne…
———————-
I’m still laughing because of the LMC and the strangenut :-D
Wowbaggersays
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
And calling Schweitz a country of “brotherly love” is pretty much stretching it. A hothch-potch of Italian, German, French and Retroromansch, yes. Love, not so much. Just look at their current immigration policies.
Anyway, I’d rather see the completion of Darwin’s Large Hadrosaur Collider.
Oh, and the solution to the Fermi Paradox? They are here – we just happen to call them Hungarians.
JoJosays
if venus where inhabitable, which in another setting somehow somewhere must be, we would be colonizing it, which invalidates the disaster-experiment explanation.
As the old saying goes, if your aunt had balls she’d be your uncle.
Venus’ enormously CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the solar system, creating surface temperatures of over 460°C. This makes Venus’s surface much hotter than Mercury’s with a maximum surface temperature of 420°C, even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury’s distance from the Sun and receives only 25% of Mercury’s solar irradiance. Just to put those temperatures in perspective, lead’s melting point is 327 °C (621°F).
I doubt humans will be colonizing Venus any time soon.
DaveLsays
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
You have to love the bizarre, twisted value system inherent in this quote.
What did that produce? 500 years of peace, democracy and brotherly love! Why would we need to justify these things with some ancillary benefit?
SCsays
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
The “but” in that sentence is key. I’m simplifying, but in “Italy” in this era there were many great artists primarily because those with money and power patronized art and used it in competition for status. There was an institutional infrastructure in place to recruit and train people with artistic talent, and artists were supported with public, private, and ecclesiastical funds. The argument that “warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed” promoted (what is the proposed mechanism?) rather than interfered with artistic production is unfounded. World Wars I and II offer some evidence of the effects of organized violence on the arts and on the preservation of the artistic heritage. Not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan,…
Ironically creationists lean on the exact same argument this cartoon makes:
“The history of science is one of upsetting the status quo. Evolution is the status quo; therefore we are the next step in the history of science.”
Dahansays
SC @ 52,
Exactly. warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed have often been shown to undermine the arts and not to have a promoting effect. Think back on Germany circa 1920’s and 30’s. The Bauhaus, de Stihl, and other artistic movements that are some of the most important in the last 500 years were just hitting their stride. However, all of them were irreprably damaged by the Nazi’s (do I fall to Godwin’s law law here, or do I get a pass?) attack on entartete kunst “degenerate art”.
Some of the artist were killed, others fled to different countries, but we’ll never know just how far they could have gone if not disrupted. Reminds me of Hypatia and The Library at Alexandria.
Silisays
Well, WWI did give us Quatuor pour la fin du temps …
“The opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.”
QrazyQatsays
Nicely framed as always, PZ.
JoJosays
However, all of them were irreprably damaged by the Nazi’s (do I fall to Godwin’s law law here, or do I get a pass?) attack on entartete kunst “degenerate art”.
Godwin’s Law is not applicable if you’re giving an appropriate example involving Hitler or the Nazi Party. However, you do lose points for the inappropriate use of an apostrophe in Nazis.
Only if there was only one Nazi involved (you could say Hitler, but it would be a stretch). :)
Damn!
More coffee. Must have more coffee.
SCsays
Apostrophes aside, I completely agree with you, Dahan.
What’s true of art is even more true of science, which is part of the reason I’m so troubled by the scientist-as-antiestablishment-loner mythology Ken Miller seems to be promoting these days. Science is a social process founded upon collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and building upon the work of those who have come before, and is highly dependent on public support. (This is not to discount the role of creativity, original ideas, or status competition; just to situate them in the cooperative framework in which research occurs.) The myth of the scientific rebel-individualist plays right into arguments like: “The history of science is one of upsetting the status quo. Evolution is the status quo; therefore we are the next step in the history of science.” It also draws attention away from the need for proper public funding of and institutional support for scientific work. [/rant]
David Marjanović, OMsays
Oh, and the solution to the Fermi Paradox? They are here – we just happen to call them Hungarians.
ROTFL!!!
Reminds me of a New Scientist headline: “Where do we come from? And why do some of us speak Basque?”
h.c.says
@JoJo : typo from me. Not “where” but “were”. This is a hypothetical situation. It is possible that two inhabitable planets exist. Taking into account the size of the universe, it should be. Venus was damn close. In that case we would colonize this sister planet. Experiments that could doom civilization (be it social, biological or physical experiments) will be done on one of the planets. If that experiments fails, the other planet won’t do it. So, if there are somewhere two planets with an intellugent civilisation on one of them, an experiment like the LHC can never be the cause of the not-spreading of this civilisation. End of the argument against the LHC.
@David Marjanović : I read all of them and #6. But the point could be that the situation described in the referred paper leads to stuff hat is not gravitaionally bound to earth. Suppose a black hole is created : it is small enough to zip through anything before being noticed and leave earth. However, in the LHC gravity-bound stuff will be created. Maybe the reasoning is wrong, ok, but at least consider the possibility.
About being evil : that was rude because not true and based on false assumptions, but I shouldn’t have started with the ignorant stuff. Sorry.
Azkyrothsays
Can you produce a plausible mechanism by which the LHC could destroy civilization, H.C.? (As in, one that reflects the proposer having learned physics in school rather than from Godzilla movies).
Azkyrothsays
But the point could be that the situation described in the referred paper leads to stuff hat is not gravitaionally bound to earth. Suppose a black hole is created : it is small enough to zip through anything before being noticed and leave earth. However, in the LHC gravity-bound stuff will be created. Maybe the reasoning is wrong, ok, but at least consider the possibility.
….
Gravity does not work that way.
Azkyrothsays
There is a reason why no intelligent life spread through the cosmos up to now, and a necessary experiment with unexpected results might be it.
I consider it much more plausible that, every time another civilization attempted to perform an experiment that was necessary to develop the technology to make interstellar expansion practical, a horde of smarmy Chicken Littles descended upon it with squawking and flying feathers about the end of the world, ultimately managing to scare away funding for the project.
Dahansays
MikeG,
Well, you can still at least take a point off for my having typed the word “law” twice in a row.
David Marjanović, OMsays
But the point could be that the situation described in the referred paper leads to stuff hat is not gravitaionally bound to earth. Suppose a black hole is created : it is small enough to zip through anything before being noticed and leave earth.
By definition, black holes have mass.
1) How do you propose a black hole created in the LHC could achieve escape velocity in one of the right directions?
2) You still act as if you hadn’t followed the link in comment 6. Collisions much more energetic than anything the LHC will achieve happen all the time, and not one has yet created a black hole!
Azkyrothsays
2) You still act as if you hadn’t followed the link in comment 6. Collisions much more energetic than anything the LHC will achieve happen all the time, and not one has yet created a black hole!
I don’t know; the contents of the Chicken LHCittles’s skulls had to come from somewhere…
Neil Bsays
OK, so that includes pissing off the current generation of scientists.
Hapsays
Pissing people off is necessary but not sufficient to indicate that one is right – just because people are angry at you doesn’t mean that you are right. It may provide ancillary evidence, but only in the presence of enough evidence to indicate rightness otherwise. Ken Ham angers people, but it isn’t likely to be because he’s right – misrepresenting the work of others, torturing logic beyond the point of incoherence, and trying to compel respect for the bastard children of his dishonesty and his ignorance is sufficient to anger people.
Can’t we all just not get along?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
“Down with Strangelets” – I like that.
Hahaha. So freaking true.
The LHC paranoia is so stupid it’s staggering. If slamming a few protons together is going to end the universe, then explain the existence of stars. Hmm? Don’t stars slam particles together at billions of electron volts?
nah, the pissed off part is a perfectly acceptable side-effect of following promising leads, but it is not a very good proxy for finding them.
people get pissed off for irrational reasons. it is not a good idea to do what irrational people say, or the opposite of what they say, either, and for the same reason.
so if you are not pissing people off, it may be because you are being too tame or conventional. but it may also be because you are doing exactly the right thing, following the right questions and projects, and their irrational piss-generators are just having a day off as part of their normal, irrational, non-truth-governed way.
the anger of the ignorant is no better of a green light than it is a red light.
ignoring it all together, however, is probably a good idea.
Change the 1859 one to 2008 and it still works.
Kobra:
Energies at the center of our Sun are about 1000 times _weaker_ than during proton-proton collisions at LHC.
However, there are much more energetic natural events, like Oh-my-God-particles: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
Also, LHC now became a sort of in-joke between geeks (kinda like DHMO – http://www.dhmo.org/).
Thats great and sadly true.
#6: I didn’t mean our sun specifically. I meant stars in general.
I wonder if any kooky fundies have latched onto the LHC as what will bring about the second coming of Christ?
Haha, I want that last panel on a T-shirt. It’s more casual than “Science. It works, bitches”.
Smashing stuff together just to see what happens. What could be more fulfilling?
“What We Need More Of Is SCIENCE!”
MC Hawking says it all!
MP3 link from songfight.org.
” Science! It works bitches”
Why is the religious fellow in the third panel talking to a giant corn nut?
And is it too much to ask that these cartoonists be able to draw? I mean, just a little?
Am I the only person who hopes that the fears of the anti-LHC crowd are justified? Can you think of a cooler way to end the world/universe?
This seems very appropriate right about now:
http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2008-04-28-its-like-the-dark-ages.html
Only a little bit OT, the readership of this blog are great for crashing polls; and I think the poll at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10103521/ on “let’s keep ‘In God We Trust'” is badly in need of being crashed.
As it happens, the Astronomy Picture of the Day is apropos.
You know, you can’t help but agree with that comic.
i like it.
for some reason it reminded me of Bill Murray (i think) in the Ghostbusters:
“Back off man, I’m a scientist!”
Luna, that one was already posted earlier. It also has WAYYYY too many respondents to “crash.”
sometimes i want to explain science to people in a friendly engaging manner. one that prods them into thinking and learning and relishing the natural wonder of the universe. you know, kinda like Carl Sagan.
then again, other times i want to explain it like Sam Kinnison. you know:
Ahhhhh!!! AAAAHHH! AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! you f***ing moron!!! black holes aren’t caused by dinosaurs and cro magnons interbreeding on the ark!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Are people really protesting the LHC?
@cthellis — Ah, drat. Sorry for that then, and thanks for the heads-up. I suppose I should have known.
PETH (People for the Ethical Treatment of Hadrons) is leading the protests. “Don’t fark with the quark!”
Seriously, there are people protesting the LHC. Here’s a website of LHC protesters.
@ Luna-the-cat & cthellis: Actually the poll was Pharyngulated for a while. However, it seems that other denizens of the internet, including lots of wingnuts started crashing too. Rather interesting current flurry on a poll that’s three years old.
Given the total number of votes that’s over six million, I’m pretty sure that some folks have voted more than once.
ha, this is awesome. I love the message at the end there too.
Awesome!
Since regular commenter Andrés Diplotti doesn’t seem to be around, and since I enjoy his work, I’m going to give him a free plug :):
http://fleasnobbery.blogspot.com/
But PZ… if you piss framers off by presenting the unvarnished facts, they won’t be able to protect everyone from the horrible realities foisted upon them by the scientific process.
Yet another thing that binds the arts and sciences. “If you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doin’ it right.” Perfect.
P.S. I am SO pumped about the LHC no matter what it finds, or doesn’t! :)
hehe, that was cute.
Oh, that is awesome. I totally want that in t-shirt form or something.
Only peripherally related, but kind of fun.
If you ain’t making waves you ain’t kicking hard enough
I suggest we build a Large Moron Collider. Fire stupid paranoid people like the ones protesting the LHC into each other at relativistic velocities and see if the impact generates a black hole of Teh St00pid as well as poetic justice.
Yowza! I has a fan! Thanks for the plug, SC :)
And semi-OT, I wasn’t around because I’ve been the whole afternoon aghast at the stupidest religious pareidolia ever: People worshipping a Jesus-shaped dog piss stain.
My pleasure.
Yes, I think we have a winner. So this
http://nynerd.com/can-you-see-jesus/
sends them into fits of pious pique, but they build a shrine around that. Kooks.
Hey! I must have done something right!
Azkyroth at #36 said:
“I suggest we build a Large Moron Collider. Fire stupid paranoid people like the ones protesting the LHC into each other at relativistic velocities and see if the impact generates a black hole of Teh St00pid as well as poetic justice.”
No! You fool! There are some kinds of knowledge Man was not meant to have!
Colliding a creationist and new-age antivaxxer at high velocities could produce an entity called a “strangenut”. This could devastate the country, turning it into land of bloated, unreasoning, credulous, passive, ignorant…Ah shit.
To be pissed off about new knowledge and wisdom… no, it just doesn’t work for me. I’m always delighted when I read about another scientific breakthrough.
I guess people who are pissed off about science are those who realise that science is an ever progressing process that will change and improve our worldview, and therefore a threat to their own dogma that can’t change because then God is wrong and therefore no longer an authority with which to scare and intimidate people.
While it’s possible to be atheist without the benefits of science – I was happily without a need for a god well before anyone explained evolution to me – it does help that it’s making it harder and harder for the religulous to claim their antiquated ooga-booga has merit on any level.
Mind you, as long as there’s a single gap in a body of knowledge they’ll be fighting to cram their diminishing sky-daddy into it.
This reminds me of a quote from Orson Welles:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Conflict: If it isn’t happening, nothing’s getting done.
Sorry guys, you are simply ignorant. I am sceptical about the LHC, mainly because of the fermi paradox. There is a reason why no intelligent life spread through the cosmos up to now, and a necessary experiment with unexpected results might be it. I have heard only two valid arguments : (1) the theory that predicts that something can happen also predicts nothing will happen. This can be countered with the remark that we know the theory is incomplete and (2) if venus where inhabitable, which in another setting somehow somewhere must be, we would be colonizing it, which invalidates the disaster-experiment explanation.
Call it being a sceptic : I can be convinced by arguments, but never by popular vote, even in a minority group.
I would gladly pay more taxes to have this LHC stuff running at L2 in outer space, with no gravitational bound to earth.
There is a reason why no intelligent life spread through the cosmos up to now, and a necessary experiment with unexpected results might be it.
Nah. Every technological civilisation discovers capitalism, which destroys its environmental support systems before it can get round to sending out von Neumann probes.
While the quote from The Third Man is pithy, it doesn’t actually reflect reality. In the 14th and 15th Centuries the Swiss spent a good bit of time gaining and keeping their independence from the Habsburgs (Battle of Sempach 1386, Battle of Näfels 1388), Charles the Bold of Burgundy (Battle of Grandson 1476), and the Holy Roman Empire (Swabian War 1499). After the Burgundian War, the Swiss Reisläufer had the reputation of being the best infantry in Europe.
Swiss mercenaries were highly regarded and commonly employed for centuries. Until the French Revolution, Swiss mercenaries were an elite part of the French army. Napoleon’s army also included Swiss troops, who fought well, and were allowed to keep their distinctive red uniforms (distinguishing them from French troops, who wore blue), although this caused some confusion on the battlefield — it was the same color worn by Napoleon’s enemies in the Spanish campaigns, the British infantry. Swiss mercenaries also fought for Spain and Austria. They were found on both sides of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The last remnant of the Swiss mercenary regiments are the Papal Swiss Guard.
Switzerland itself may have been peaceful. The Swiss were not.
You have no right to not have read comment 6, clicked on the first link, and read that whole page. Thus, the chutzpa with which you defend your ignorance is beyond words, even though you haven’t even noticed that this is what you’re doing.
It is evil to comment on a thread without having read all previous comments.
So why isn’t there intelligent life all over the cosmos? Have you read the book Rare Earth (Peter Ward & Donald Brownlee, IIRC 1997, Copernicus/Springer)? Life is probably very common out there — but intelligent life is extremely rare, because a long list of rare events is required for its evolution and against its immediate extinction. Maybe we really are alone.
But if it were incomplete in that particular way, black holes would be produced in the air all the time. See above.
I don’t understand that. Could you explain it again?
———————-
Switzerland in its modern borders wasn’t. The imperialistic canton of Berne against Savoy, Revolution of Vaud against Berne…
———————-
I’m still laughing because of the LMC and the strangenut :-D
The pedant in me has to point out that the cuckoo clock is actually German and not Swiss, as Orson Welles discovered after the film was released.
And calling Schweitz a country of “brotherly love” is pretty much stretching it. A hothch-potch of Italian, German, French and Retroromansch, yes. Love, not so much. Just look at their current immigration policies.
Anyway, I’d rather see the completion of Darwin’s Large Hadrosaur Collider.
Oh, and the solution to the Fermi Paradox? They are here – we just happen to call them Hungarians.
As the old saying goes, if your aunt had balls she’d be your uncle.
Venus’ enormously CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the solar system, creating surface temperatures of over 460°C. This makes Venus’s surface much hotter than Mercury’s with a maximum surface temperature of 420°C, even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury’s distance from the Sun and receives only 25% of Mercury’s solar irradiance. Just to put those temperatures in perspective, lead’s melting point is 327 °C (621°F).
I doubt humans will be colonizing Venus any time soon.
You have to love the bizarre, twisted value system inherent in this quote.
What did that produce? 500 years of peace, democracy and brotherly love! Why would we need to justify these things with some ancillary benefit?
The “but” in that sentence is key. I’m simplifying, but in “Italy” in this era there were many great artists primarily because those with money and power patronized art and used it in competition for status. There was an institutional infrastructure in place to recruit and train people with artistic talent, and artists were supported with public, private, and ecclesiastical funds. The argument that “warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed” promoted (what is the proposed mechanism?) rather than interfered with artistic production is unfounded. World Wars I and II offer some evidence of the effects of organized violence on the arts and on the preservation of the artistic heritage. Not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan,…
Ironically creationists lean on the exact same argument this cartoon makes:
“The history of science is one of upsetting the status quo. Evolution is the status quo; therefore we are the next step in the history of science.”
SC @ 52,
Exactly. warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed have often been shown to undermine the arts and not to have a promoting effect. Think back on Germany circa 1920’s and 30’s. The Bauhaus, de Stihl, and other artistic movements that are some of the most important in the last 500 years were just hitting their stride. However, all of them were irreprably damaged by the Nazi’s (do I fall to Godwin’s law law here, or do I get a pass?) attack on entartete kunst “degenerate art”.
Some of the artist were killed, others fled to different countries, but we’ll never know just how far they could have gone if not disrupted. Reminds me of Hypatia and The Library at Alexandria.
Well, WWI did give us Quatuor pour la fin du temps …
“The opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.”
Nicely framed as always, PZ.
Godwin’s Law is not applicable if you’re giving an appropriate example involving Hitler or the Nazi Party. However, you do lose points for the inappropriate use of an apostrophe in Nazis.
Dahan’s in the clear, JoJo. It’s properly possessive. “Nazi’s…attack.”
Dahan’s in the clear, JoJo. It’s properly possessive. “Nazi’s…attack.”
Only if there was only one Nazi involved (you could say Hitler, but it would be a stretch). :)
Only if there was only one Nazi involved (you could say Hitler, but it would be a stretch). :)
Damn!
More coffee. Must have more coffee.
Apostrophes aside, I completely agree with you, Dahan.
What’s true of art is even more true of science, which is part of the reason I’m so troubled by the scientist-as-antiestablishment-loner mythology Ken Miller seems to be promoting these days. Science is a social process founded upon collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and building upon the work of those who have come before, and is highly dependent on public support. (This is not to discount the role of creativity, original ideas, or status competition; just to situate them in the cooperative framework in which research occurs.) The myth of the scientific rebel-individualist plays right into arguments like: “The history of science is one of upsetting the status quo. Evolution is the status quo; therefore we are the next step in the history of science.” It also draws attention away from the need for proper public funding of and institutional support for scientific work. [/rant]
ROTFL!!!
Reminds me of a New Scientist headline: “Where do we come from? And why do some of us speak Basque?”
@JoJo : typo from me. Not “where” but “were”. This is a hypothetical situation. It is possible that two inhabitable planets exist. Taking into account the size of the universe, it should be. Venus was damn close. In that case we would colonize this sister planet. Experiments that could doom civilization (be it social, biological or physical experiments) will be done on one of the planets. If that experiments fails, the other planet won’t do it. So, if there are somewhere two planets with an intellugent civilisation on one of them, an experiment like the LHC can never be the cause of the not-spreading of this civilisation. End of the argument against the LHC.
@David Marjanović : I read all of them and #6. But the point could be that the situation described in the referred paper leads to stuff hat is not gravitaionally bound to earth. Suppose a black hole is created : it is small enough to zip through anything before being noticed and leave earth. However, in the LHC gravity-bound stuff will be created. Maybe the reasoning is wrong, ok, but at least consider the possibility.
About being evil : that was rude because not true and based on false assumptions, but I shouldn’t have started with the ignorant stuff. Sorry.
Can you produce a plausible mechanism by which the LHC could destroy civilization, H.C.? (As in, one that reflects the proposer having learned physics in school rather than from Godzilla movies).
….
Gravity does not work that way.
I consider it much more plausible that, every time another civilization attempted to perform an experiment that was necessary to develop the technology to make interstellar expansion practical, a horde of smarmy Chicken Littles descended upon it with squawking and flying feathers about the end of the world, ultimately managing to scare away funding for the project.
MikeG,
Well, you can still at least take a point off for my having typed the word “law” twice in a row.
By definition, black holes have mass.
1) How do you propose a black hole created in the LHC could achieve escape velocity in one of the right directions?
2) You still act as if you hadn’t followed the link in comment 6. Collisions much more energetic than anything the LHC will achieve happen all the time, and not one has yet created a black hole!
I don’t know; the contents of the Chicken LHCittles’s skulls had to come from somewhere…
OK, so that includes pissing off the current generation of scientists.
Pissing people off is necessary but not sufficient to indicate that one is right – just because people are angry at you doesn’t mean that you are right. It may provide ancillary evidence, but only in the presence of enough evidence to indicate rightness otherwise. Ken Ham angers people, but it isn’t likely to be because he’s right – misrepresenting the work of others, torturing logic beyond the point of incoherence, and trying to compel respect for the bastard children of his dishonesty and his ignorance is sufficient to anger people.