phision, on 13 July 2012 - 05:08 PM, said:
I watched Professor Brian Cox in the videos above and NEED to publicly state that I hate his inane smile!
Yeah – it bothers me at times, too, and begs public comment.
Brian Cox comes across to me as a sort of puppy-like undergrad, even though, at 44, his undergrad days are half a lifetime past. As with an actual dog that keeps its puppyishness, that can be either delighting or annoying, depending on your general disposition, current mood, and its proximity.
The first time I saw Cox was in a DVD extra for the IMHO awful 2007 scifi movie
Sunshine, which credits him as it’s “scientific consultant”, in which he spends some minutes explaining that the movie’s science (which, in short, is that the Sun has suddenly switched off, the Earth is freezing, and only a really big nuclear bomb delivered by a spaceship crewed by lunatics can restart it and save us all) is pretty much crap, but if it wasn’t, the movie might have replaced its barely mentioned “the sun just went out” explanation with something along the lines he describes, which is that the Sun has been struck by a stray
strangelet, causing it to begin converting to a quark star. Cox clearly enjoyed being involved in making a major movie, even if his influence in making its science reasonable was little to nothing.
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He would have been better suited to being a pop-star! lol
I can only assume you’ve not heard Cox’s keyboard playing with D:Ream, a band that gave, and to my continuing dismay, has recently reformed to continue giving pop a bad name.
Regardless of his piano-playing skill or lack thereof, to be a pop
star, one must sing, which I don’t think Cox does.
I think Cox has found his niche as a science publicizer, a worthy profession, IMHO, as the public needs all the science exposure it can get.
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However what did occur to me was, what are 10,000 physicists and engineers going to do for jobs now that the biggest science experiment ever has reached it's goal(?)?
I don’t follow its plans closely, but don’t believe it was ever intended that the
LHC be a single-use apparatus to detect the Higgs boson. I think folk smart, hard-working and lucky enough to work there, and at other major physics labs, have at least as secure a professional future as technical sorts like myself, and far more secure than people with less formal education.
That said, it’s been argued (for example, by David Halberstam in his 1993 history
The Fifties) that the best times for science education and education in general followed big reductions in the number of research jobs available, resulting in people who had planned on such careers instead teaching school, in many cases grades 7-12. The post WWII period was such a time, when many students that studied physics thinking to follow in the footsteps of the “hero scientists” associated with atomic weapons and rocketry found themselves instead teaching school. One of my favorite teachers and college advisor, got his PhD in aerospace engineering hoping to design spacecraft for NASA. It’s been my experience that such “unintentional teachers” are consistently better than ones who set out to become teachers.
It’s my hope that, were CERN and the world’s other major basic science labs to have their budgets and science staff drastically cut, long term, science wouldn’t suffer, because the sift in employment of science-minded people from research education will result in a better and larger pool of science-minded
and educated people in the next generation.
MacPhee, on 14 July 2012 - 06:47 AM, said:
Modern particle Physics is completely crazy. No-one has any idea what the Physicists are talking about. Least of all the Physicists themselves. But they can't say so, as they'd look daft.
As I explained at some length in
this post, MacPhee, you seem to be afflicted with the fallacious belief that, because you don’t understand something, nobody does. Your reply,
MacPhee, on 09 July 2012 - 07:51 AM, said:
CraigD's hugely impressive posts afflict me with a sense of intellectual inferiority. They make me feel like an ant. (I don't mean that sarcastically, but in genuine admiration). I cannot adequately reply to such posts - let other ants rear up against the mighty aardvark, if they dare.
gave me the impression that you might have found some sense in my screed, but here you are, a week later, making effectively the same, effectively anti-scientific, claim, which gives me the impression your 7/9 post
was made sarcastically and insincerely.
As you should know, having been temporarily suspended for the offense in the past, hypography’s rules require that you back up your claims with links or references. We tend to relax enforcement of this rule for statement that are clearly opinions, and qualified as such, but here you are making a direct assertion of fact: that physicists don’t understand what they talk about. You should back this claim up, by finding a credible source – for example, an anti-scientific journal or editorial newspaper.
Better yet, study physics. Rather than alleging that nobody understands is, try to yourself.
Hypography is not an anti-science website.
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