The death of Gwyneth Dunwoody is a sad loss to a Parliament already seriously short of independent-minded, plain-speaking politicians who won't be bullied into toeing the line (unlike that junior minister no one had ever heard of, who decided not to resign after all, following a transatlantic phone call from the Supreme Leader). When Blair, typically, tried to get rid of La Dunwoody, fed up with her 'Vinegar Lill' acuity, her fellow MPs for once rallied round and refused to do their master's bidding. Of course she was a frightful old leftie at heart - but that's not the point.
This is also the day on which Einstein died, having, in his latter years, embodied all too successfully the Scientist as Sage and Magus. The absurd notion that because someone is especially good at a branch of science they are somehow in touch with eternal verities and profound wisdom is, alas, still with us, embodied now in the all too iconic form of Stephen Hawking. Let's hope he's the last of the line.
Much less the magus, but a scientist who gave the world a nice idea, Edward Lorenz of 'butterfly effect' fame, also died the other day. Chaos theory - now that makes sense...
Friday, April 18, 2008
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Pah !, physicists, what do they know of the price of spagel.
ReplyDeleteTake young Murray, for instance, yomping all over that nice clean desert in his dirty hobnails, lying in his tent at night, furiously scribbling down sums on the back of his map.
Then there's that Fyneman, thrumming away on the bongos until four o'clock in the morning, no wonder he went crackers.
Look at poor old Oppy, standing at that lathe all day, surrounded by dogends, machining up bits for that Jap fireworks show. Still, the Feds cooked his goose in the end !
Won't even discuss the Hiedelburg mob,
permanently pissed they were, well, have you seen the size of that wine barrel ? 30,000 litres of Rheingau rotgut.
Staggering up and down that muddy path, backwards and forwards, past the Speers house, young Albert sitting gazing out of the window, dreaming of that day in the near future....
Then we come to clever clogs, smart arse himself, one idea and the rest of his angst strewn life chewing his fingers, trying to work it out, everybody taking the piss.
And how do we know its squared ? go on tell me that. Suppose its cubed then eh !
120 Years of "rapid advancement" they say ! for what, a bang. Anybody ever heard this bang then?...... thought not, bang indeed, Arams was right mate , its 6.
Einstein died a year ago, relatively speaking.
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