I love Gmail. Every time my available storage space increases by 30%, I feel like writing a fan letter. This has happened three times since this summer. It's fucking exponential! I now have 6.1GB. That's like a whole PC hard drive in 1995.
Speaking of fan mail, this guy has the coolest blog I've ever seen. He's developing a Grand Unification Theory on his own, in his spare time, while working some weak day job. I don't know if he's just talking out of his ass or if he's on to something significant; I just like his gumption. He never has any comments on his posts, and I sincerely hope that it's because his friends and colleagues write out arguments by hand or something, then talk to him IRL about his ideas. I hope it's not because he has no readers. Other than me.
It is certain that he has a major beef with Alan Ginsparg, a man who I'm sure never expected to see his own face superimposed on the body of Big Bird on an amateur cosmologists blog.
Cosmology is at a very interesting and awkward stage, while particle physics is really taking off. We're about to shake the Higgs boson about of the WSOGMM (Whole Sort of General Mish Mash), hopefully, which will do a lot for supersymmetry's standing as a valid model (or fuck it over if we don't find it!). I really hope the research we do with the LHC clarifies the weirdness we've been looking at the last couple decades, and helps us drop such mathematical parlour tricks as renormalisation, or subtracting infinities from each other to make the equations come out tidy. String theory--is strange. As charmed as I am by Dr. Brian Greene (quark jokes aside), I simply do not have the math to know whether I should be taking string theory seriously. I'm unnerved by one aspect of it, though: the practise of adding extra dimensions until it comes out right reminds me of the astronomers who kept adding epicycles to the Ptolemaic model. I don't know how we can test string theory, either. (These are the things I'm going to college to find out.) But I think this is a crucial and exciting time, and I wouldn't be surprised by a working GUT within my lifetime.
There are so few facilities at which I can study particle physics in this country. I hear rumours of linear accelerators at Western or Evergreen, but I can't find any references to these apparatus on the schools' respective websites, and I'd imagine that they'd be happy to show and tell. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL, if you remember) has petitioned the Bush administration to not cut funding for high-energy physics by the $88 million proposed for 2008, which both kills domestic HEP research and our participation in international projects. In other words, it makes the US less interesting and look dumber to the other scientific communities, as well as retarding progress. But I bet the Bushies think the only physics they need to worry about is the law of gravity, and only because they need it to bomb.
Please join me in writing to our state reps in urging them to support funding for major physics research projects and facilities.
Email Senator Patty Murray
Email Senator Maria Cantwell
Email Representative Jim McDermott (he's my rep, anyway)
Email Representative Norm Dicks (for my Bremerton homies)
Oh, and by the way: CERN invented the World Wide Web. Remember that the next time you feel like moaning "What has physics ever done for me?"
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