singularities

Well, they turned on that large hadron collider last week and nothing happened the way the doomsayers said it would.

Most importantly of course, is that the world didn’t end. Secondary to that is that space time didn’t rip, large furry three headed lizards of fearsome intelligence didn’t step out of the void and tertiary is that we didn’t all collapse into a small black hole in Switzerland;  consigned to the afterlife, or to some odd Swiss singularity and to the everlasting sound of cuckoo-clocks! 

Now, they spent a lot of money on this thing and I can’t see the merits of a spend like that when you stack it up against something like, say, the Apollo moon missions.

You see, to me, those lunar shots were worth every penny the United States government spent.

And the point is this: the moon missions did more than just go to the moon; they created a notion of America. And that notion is this: everything to which any nation, to which any person, should aspire  is possible.

Read the books about it! Sure, there’s the hands-on-heart schmatlz, but you can never escape the fact: the United States did something of stupendous importance to humanity.

And what was done most of all was this: A Nation became galvanised, united and caught up in the dream of doing the almost impossible. If you compare today’s technology to that of 1968 (when they actually committed to going), it becomes even more impressive.

John Kennedy wasn’t much of a president, if you take the time to dig deeply enough into his background; but, if anything, he was a guy with his head firmly planted in the clouds. But by God! could he dream! And if there is a redeeming quality in the man, it is that he is probably the last of those who believed in America – the last of those who could dream.

I don’t mean the America where opportunity is defined as someone to be taken advantage of in the pursuit of personal gain. I mean America, where the Declaration of Independence had meaning in the daily lives of it’s citizens, America, where The Constitution had not only legal weight, but a moral imperative second only to The Ten Commandments. It was a nation of ideals, a nation of freedom in it’s purest sense forged from a pioneering spirit.

Then someone killed him!

It was easy to forget in 1968 when men orbited the moon for the first time, that Americans were dying in Vietnam, or at least it would have been easy if there hadn’t been so much civil unrest in the country. But the dream kind of makes all that a bit blurry now. And the dream did so again in 1969 when they landed and walked on the moon. And the funny thing was this: when people from around the globe spoke to those involved in the space programme, they all said “We did it!” They said, “We”!

Can you name one thing in the last forty years which has caused just about every living person on the planet to say “We did it”, when in fact, someone else has done it?

And then America went all to hell! Perhaps it was the concept of corruption at executive level that killed it for Americans (me, I don’t know…Nixon was a great president! History will bear me out)

There are dreamers there still – I know some of them, but the administration has taken over.

The Consitution of The United States may as well be an epilogue to a romance novel these days.

So what has this got to do with the large hadron collider? Not a lot really, but I find it hard to get excited about something which has cost a multi-billion pound sum in the pursuit of a theory. It may theoretically do this and it may theoretically do that and I’m sure it has real and tangible value to someone somewhere who has a head full of theoretical physics.

But at the end of the day, it’s a sub-atomic crash-test train set.

When I go to bed, I won’t dream about the origins of the universe being demonstrated, I’ll dream about astronauts and exploration and rockets and believing in the impossible.

That’s what I’ll dream about; and there’s a lot of that missing in the world these days.

And now I’ll add a postscript and it’s about astronauts:

I could write a book about astronauts, but it’s been done.

It is 2008.

Once, in history, there were were heroes.

the ayes have it

Now, I have never made a secret of the fact that mathematics isn’t one of my strong points; this doesn’t embarrass me, it doesn’t bother me and it’s certainly not something I regret. And this is not to say that I don’t “get” math – I don’t particularly want to “get” it! Given a good teacher, math made perfect sense to me, but that never made it apparent what the actual point was!

I realised at a pretty early age that my brain was leaning towards language and the written word.

Fair enough, some mathematical theorems turned out to have their uses. Take Pythagoras for example: he taught me that when driving somewhere, there’s no need to go ’round when you can go straight down the middle. Then again, I’ll bet Pythagoras never figured on one-way traffic systems, so in a sense, you can actually disprove that particular theorem vis a vis it’s practicality in the 21st century! And just to get that particular theorem to work, you had to multiply everything by itself and then add them up just to arrive at a conclusion which, although interesting enough, is actually pretty pointless when you can just drive down the middle – assuming you’re not in a one-way traffic system! And here’s something else: you definitely won’t be whipping out a calculator just to see if you’re actually going to save time or distance; and your satnav doesn’t particularly care either!

But recently, my thoughts have turned to what it was about math that never did it for me and what it was about language that did do it for me.  And here it is:

Math is an absolute and language isn’t. For example, 2+2=4; that’s it! That has always been it and that will always be it! Sure you can add a few zeros here and there and you end up with an exponential of the same numbers, but make no mistake – they are still the same numbers.

But language is a different kettle of fish. Take for example the word Gay: fifty years ago, it meant happy. Today, generally, it means something else entirely, but it still also means happy. So thirty years ago when Larry Grayson was saying “What a gay day!”, he meant one thing but was implying another. Those same thirty years ago, 2+2=4; pretty boring, huh? Hell, two million years ago, 2+2=4!

Mathematicians like to bang on about how mathematics is the only pure language and they may have a point there, but think of this: it’s always been around and these fine folk needed actual language to express it. So we humans now have a “language” which the math chaps call pure, but it wouldn’t exist without the spoken and written word. And to dispel any arguments before they arise, why else would they have spent so much time raping the Greek alphabet and a goodly portion of the English one to express some of their more complex riddles?

And you can’t tell a story using math…Physicists will say, “Yes. We can express the creation of the universe mathematically”; but if you choose to believe in such stuff, the bible does it somewhat more eloquently. And Stephen King would have never had quite the impact he has had if, in ‘Salem’s Lot, he had chosen to describe Ben Mears pounding a stake through a vampire’s heart as an equation outlining the conservation of momentum!

It boils down to this: they say eskimos have about fifty words for snow, I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that I can say I’m telling a lie in quite a few different ways, or that I can say yes, or aye to confirm assent. 2+2 will always be 4.

And let me tell you this: 2-2=0, or put in English: two minus two equals nothing. If I had a choice of saying yes as a “1″ or an “aye”, the ayes will aways have it.