Tumescent Moon

I've just discovered - nearly ten years after the event, but I never claimed to be fast - that Stephen Hawking has changed his mind and declared that a Theory of Everything is unachievable. This is not quite as radical a piece of side-switching as the Pope announcing his conversion to Islam would be, but it's pretty significant and his reasons are interesting (not new, but interesting anyway, especially given his status in the world of science). Some Background Towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a general feeling among scientists that explaining the universe was on the verge of being done and dusted: there were still some minor issues to be resolved, but essentially all the elements of a complete explanation were in place and all that was left for the future was further refinement. So much for science, but in the field of mathematics things were not quite as rosy - the branch known as set theory was undergoing a major crisis as a result of the discovery tha...

I was half-watching a documentary about one of Dan Brown's books of piffle (probably 'Angels And Demons' but I wasn't really paying a great deal of attention) that (undoubtedly because I wasn't paying a great deal of attention) inexplicably seemed to segue into a nun waxing indignant about the Higgs boson . Now it's always pleasant to be presented with evidence that scientists have a sense of humour, but nicknaming the thing 'the God particle' was possibly one jape too far as it presented this poor woman with a large number of sticks, the wrong ends of which she was waggling vigorously and embarrassingly in public. This reminded me of a piece I read quite some time ago in which Deepak Chopra was trying to pray the Copenhagen interpretation in aid of the proposition of Eastern philosophy that reality is constructed by the mind rather than the other way around (it's not actually as absurd an idea as it may sound!). The comprehensive rogering that ...