Gwyneth's personal blog

Monday 22nd June, warm. A bright, downy layered overcast, the kind of sky that promises rain or sun, but fails to deliver either.

Last Wednesday, on a chill June evening, we took the train to Shoreham for an event in the Adur Festival Art of Science programme, a multi-media science lecture presented by Philip Harris from Sussex Uni, devised by Harris, Richard Durrant, and Malcolm Buchanan-Dick. Truly awesome and far-reaching it says here, and no word of a lie. A short history of the alphabet soup (or "particle zoo") that presently pertains, quarks and all, with abstract music and visuals generated from the EDM experiment at Grenoble. Thoroughly good and gripping exposition of what "we" currently think is going on,and why. Supposing it isn't turtles all the way down, that is. We always have to take this kind of thing on faith of course, how could it be otherwise, but it was excellent fun, how refreshing to see a full house for the most abstruse of natural philosophy, and a welcome alternative to Richard Dawkins feeble "The God Delusion"

read recently, in response to a challenge on this blog from Marc Jacobs, "what have you got against Dawkins??"

. . . Dawkin's whole argument seeming to be "Don't worship that silly opinionated old bloke on a cloud over there, worship THIS silly, opinionated middle-aged bloke over here! To be fair, someone pointed out it's really a fractious response to the drubbing he got from Bible Belt creationists, but even so! He ought to be ashamed.

I wanted to ask exactly how the "measurements of asymmetries within a neutron" related to the whale-song style sound and Acid Test light show, but there were too many other people with much better prepared questions, & I wouldn't have understood much of the answer, so I just paid attention instead.