Like many people my age, given a college computer and five minutes before my next lesson I will aimless read and re-read various pages on the BBC News and Sport websites. Why I assume that a story concerning Roald Dahl’s shed being moved will have updated after a minute of reading about the Rugby world cup that I haven’t watched any of, I don’t know, but I refresh the page anyway.
As dull as my existence may seem in the light of that previous paragraph, aimless browsing in fact led me to read a really rather interesting article about the CERN tube thing that lives underneath Switzerland this week. Apparently some particles travelled faster than the speed of light, which, to physicists at least, is the equivalent of finding out that two plus three actually equals Al Jazeera. If proved reliable with further testing this finding also means that Einstein (or one of his theories) was wrong. Surely then if Einstein can’t be trusted on physics, other previously universally trusted resources such as textbooks, head university lecturers and Wikipedia are in fact as reliable as the moral compass of a Daily Mail journalist. Speaking of which, I took a look at what the Mail online had to say about this scientific discovery, only to find myself distracted by the column of tit-related scandal that runs down the side of the page, drawing my eyes and soul into a murky world of the x-factor and cancer.
Anyway, the BBC article essentially puts into perspective how apathetic we’ve become when it comes to the kind of news that really should be shaking the foundations of what we know as reality. We’re so used to this kind of headline, that if it became clear that all mass, time and existence led directly back to Fred Dibnah then we’d wait for the relevant satirical reference on ‘Mock the Week’ before forgetting all about it.
We’re lucky in this country though, as it’s not everywhere that often confusing and sometimes nihilistic physics theories actually make the mainstream. The highly successful ‘Wonders of the Universe’ is a good example, although it and Brian Cox’s popularity are a slight mystery to me. Cox seems so smiley and relaxed when he speaks it’s almost as if he’s receiving an amazing massage from an out of shot koala bear. He also uses the words billion and trillion with such regularity that they quickly lose all sense of being amazing and huge- as result, by the end of the show the only way to make the universe seem anything but tiny is for Cox to use made-up numbers like a dillion gajillion.
Yet despite all this Cox has (apparently) become a bit of a sex icon. In the same way Elvis inspired a generation of teenage girls to live the rock and roll dream, Cox has inspired a generation of women approaching middle age to contemplate the relative position of dark matter in the universe in terms of time and gravity. This can only be a good thing for physics, and it also means it no longer relies entirely on the jokes in the CGP textbooks to make itself seem interesting.
Before I go I should mention that this blog almost definitely contains numerous physics-related inaccuracies. So if you notice one, please just lower your personal opinion of me without letting me know, because editing is just effort.
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