The Biggest Toy Theory of Scientific endeavor: Science is not driven by curiosity or the desire for fame. Rather it is driven by the desire to accumulate bigger and more complex scientific gadgets. By this standard, particle physicists are gods walking among us. And if those gadgets could be used to irradiate a squirrel from a thousand miles a way, so much the better for all of us.
Exhibit A: The Large Hadron Collider (Click to enlarge)
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The World Wide Web began at the Swiss nuclear research facility, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and that may be its biggest claim to fame. But CERN really is a nuclear research facility and is home to some of the most advanced technologies for probing the inner workings of…
I know FoxNews does this all the time, but sometimes I accidentally click through to their site and am shocked anew by this sort of thing:
Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it's finally switched on this summer?Um, well, you may…
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge." -Enrico Fermi
As you probably know, the Large Hadron Collider -- site of discovery of the last fundamental particle in the Standard Model, the Higgs Boson -- is the most energetic particle…
I confess to feeling a faint twinge of envy at all the news about the Large Hadron Collider. It's Big Science, it's got lots of shiny fancy gadgets, and it's like NASCAR for nerds — they get to spin things together at high speed and smash them together. We biologists lack anything quite so dramatic…
Classic. Bench scientist misses pigeons. Hits helicopter. Pigeons fly away whispering to each other, "eppur si muove."