Quote of the Month
From Overbye's article in The New York Times:
In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”
You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider...
posted by Kea | 1:17 PM
5 Comments:
Sadly I was not here...
Sorry for not having the opportunity to talk in Oxford.
By the way, I happen to known Holger Nielsen personally. I talked with him in few conferences. I was ultra-shy and spoke miserable english but due to his incredible friendliness I was able to produce more or less comprehensible sentences about TGD. He was extremely eager to learn and kept asking until he understood. He is certainly the most positive person I have ever encountered. He is is not from this world. Maybe he is an angel from those higher levels of dark matter hierarchy;-).
One cannot imagine Holger's super-energetic child-like appearance unless one has seen him in a conference giving a talk in the middle of slide storm.
I have a friend who was as a student in Copenhagen at the time when Holger Nielsen with his group developed string model. Holger was the second person who discoved string model independently. Every monday morning he arrived to Niels Bohr institute full of energy, ideas, and love in clean white shirt and bow-tie. During a week of endless intellectual hurricane the shirt however got a yellowish hue. Holger lived with his mother who took care that Holger arrived to institute in white shirt and bow-tie at monday.
Holger is a genius and genius and madness look like being near to each other from the point of view of smaller souls. The point is that Holger one of the very few persons in science who has got rid of his ego if he has ever had it. He is not calculating all the time whether this what he says spoils his reputation. He is just developing an interesting idea and forgets completely himself. Holger has also a vivid sense of humor and loving self irony maybe, this paper is just a joke. He will not tell.
The first Nobel about strings will be awarded within few years. For Holger Nobel does not matter but for many others it matters. I am afraid that the allowance to publish this article and making great news about it is one manner to build him a reputation of mad man. The fewer the number of candidates, the better;-). The Nobel prices tend to go to USA as we know.
What you say makes me even more certain that this is all a joke.
It is too bad you could not stay longer in Oxford, but NZ climate is much nicer. England will sink into the sea long before New Zealand does.
Actually, Louise, it is not at all certain that NZ will live longer than the UK. NZ is very young, and much of the South Island could well end up in the sea with future tectonic shifts.
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