It is depressing is how soon after arriving in Whitehall ministers seem to pick up the traditional line on science funding.
Minister: Ok, so I’m a bit new to this stuff. Why do we fund science?
Usual suspect 1: Erm … I always forget this bit.
Continued at The Guardian.
I speak my brain on Channel 4 News about the booksellers’ current favourite controversy – Stephen Hawking versus God
Yesterday, when I should have been writing a paper about data from the Atlas detector at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider, I was taxied across Geneva to talk live on television to Jon Snow about Stephen Hawking’s apparent sudden conversion to atheism.
Physics World has the video here.
Talking about God is well out of my comfort zone but I thought I should agree to do it since I worry that manufactured religion vs science wars can be very damaging and I didn’t feel I should wimp out of trying to inject some sense.
In fact Jon Snow and Channel 4 News hosted what I think was a very reasonable discussion. Phew.
Oh, and by the way, Stephen Hawking hasn’t changed his mind about God.
(also at The Guardian although the video is broken)
PS “Speak My Brains”, hat-tip to the Day Today.
Slightly expanded version of this post now available on The Guardian.
The conference on “Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions“, which my colleagues and I organised in Bonn, finished yesterday. The entire week I was thinking I would drop into bed and sleep for a full day. But oddly, I feel quite refreshed. It was great fun listening to the talks and discussing with so many friends and colleagues, despite all the organisational headaches. The conference dinner was on an elegant boat which in an earlier life was used for the signing ceremony of the Schengen agreement. (For us mainland Europeans this is a big deal.)
Supersymmetry seems alive and well and ready to face the challenge from the LHC. But what is supersymmetry? And what is so super about it? Why are we so taken with it, even though there is as yet no experimental evidence it actually exists? There are two main arguments, first it is a solution to the `hierarchy problem’. I will save this for a potential second post, if Jon invites me back. The other is indeed an aesthetic argument related to the `Coleman-Mandula theorem’.
Now, I tell myself every morning in front of the bathroom mirror, that aesthetics is for wimps, but it is all the same an interesting argument.
Life and Physics 