Aaron Mullan, Krautrock cash-in bassist (why don’t you just join the Pixies dude?), is one hell of a Science and Psychology guy, herein justifying his existence and all of Rock n Roll Creation. For the first time ever, Glass Rock Life presents an unedited, unlinked response with our very own Great Brain. Enjoy.
New York Times Super Collider Madness
1) Can you please explain this ^^^ to Johnny and Jane Layperson?
The material of the universe as we know it (pretty much the stuff in the periodic table, and the molucules assembled from that) is forged in stars via nuclear fusion. The carbon of which life is made, the iron which comprises our guitar strings, and the copper that transmits our status updates was all made in stars out of hydrogen atoms getting smashed together, a process that also provides the electromagnetic energy which sustains life on this planet and interferes with our FM reception.
We can create similar reactions on earth but they are sort of hard to control (think H bomb).
In an attempt to understand the other types of matter and energy which exist in the Universe (or did exist at the very beginning), scientists attempt to smash various stuff together and figure out WTF is going on, or went on.
2) How will this [what is described in the article] affect our lives? How is it analogous to the evolution of “punk” music?
The exciting thing is that we have no idea how it will affect our lives. A great Carl Sagan bit from ‘The Demon-Haunted World’: ‘Suppose: You are, by the Grace of God, Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom…Your dominions stretch across the planet…You preside over the world’s leading technological power…Suppose in the year 1860 you have a visionary idea, so daring it would have been rejected by Jules Verne’s publisher. You want a machine that will carry your voice, as well as moving pictures of the glory of the Empire into every home of the Kingdom. What’s more the sounds and pictures must not come through conduits or wires, but somehow out of the air…[This project] would almost certainly fail…The physics neccesary to invent radio and television would come from a direction that no one could have predicted: James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1831 and was working as a patent clerk at the time.
‘If Queen Victoria had ever called an urgent meeting of her counselors, and ordered them to invent the equivalent of radio and television, it is unlikely that any of them would have imagined the path to lead through the experiments of Ampere, Biot, Oersted and Faraday, four equations of vector calculus, and the judgment to preserve the displacement current in a vacuum.”
Sagan was in part celebrating general nerdism, but the larger point is that fundamental knowledge of physics will lead us in unimaginable directions.
Evolution is all similar in that it does not have a decided goal. Life on earth did not evolve with humans as the given end product, nor did Maxwell’s equations lead inexorably to ‘Alf’, nor did the MC5 have Avril Lavigne (well not her music) in mind when jamming ‘Sister Anne’.
3) Do you think being a physicist is stressful?
Same as anyone else. Really existentally stressful when your superconducting supercollider gets the plug pulled. But the CERN collider raises some people’s hopes. I like how the Times article ends:
“Michael Barnett, a physicist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that he had worked on an experiment for the Superconducting Supercollider for 10 years until the project was canceled by Congress, and later spent 16 years on the Atlas experiment at the CERN collider. “We are on this planet and in this universe a short time,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “The dreams of a lifetime are waiting, and hopefully not much longer.””
[Don't worry Mike, Glass Rock hits the studio next Thursday.]
