Welcome to our Tuesday Open Thread. First day back at the grind after a long weekend and apparently we are in for a real heat wave all week. It is too early to have to crank up the AC. Just make sure all of your new plants have plenty of water this week.
The European Magazine interviews Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who is the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and also oversees the CERN laboratories in Switzerland. Great (but too short) interview with Heuer discussing the mis-naming of the “God-particle”; the limits of human knowledge and the boundaries between science and religion:
The European: Let us talk about the idea of the divine. For much of human history, religion and science were deeply intertwined. Galileo was expelled from the church for questioning those links. How would you separate the two realms?
Heuer: We separate knowledge from belief. Particle physics is asking the question of how did things develop? Religion or philosophy ask about why things develop. But the boundary between the two is very interesting. I call it the interface of knowledge. People start asking questions like “if there was a Big Bang, why was it there?” For us physicists, time begins with the Big Bang. But the question remains whether anything existed before that moment. And was there something even before the thing that was before the Big Bang? Those are questions where knowledge becomes exhausted and belief starts to become important.
One of the amusing things about listening to the media discuss Newt Gingrich is their insistence that Newt represents the *intellectual* of Republican Party politics these days. As if the barely coded BS of “con man” or “Kenyan” or “socialist” counts as intellectual heft. Michael Lind at Salon takes a look at another of the brain-dead intellects of the right, Niall Ferguson, who is currently hawking another disposable book:
Ferguson is the most prominent of a number of British conservative intellectuals and journalists who have found more sympathetic audiences in the U.S. than in their own country, where their enthusiasm for Victorian imperialism and Victorian economics stigmatizes them as cranks. His Old World accent and reactionary politics might not have been sufficient to earn Niall Ferguson his cisatlantic celebrity, were it not for the demise of American intellectual conservatism, chronicled by Sam Tanenhaus and others. The mass extinction of America’s intellectual right at the hands of anti-intellectual Jacksonian populists like the Tea Partyers has created a lack of native conservative thinkers with impressive academic credentials who are willing to dash to a TV studio at a moment’s notice. And in an era when the conservative movement is symbolized by lightweights like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg, rather than William F. Buckley Jr., George Will and Irving Kristol, even Niall Ferguson can be mistaken for an intellectual.
Ouch! But dead on and it never ceases to amaze me how reverently these self-styled intellectuals are referred to in the media. When the wingnut right are busily racing to the bottom, there is no need to either join them or help them normalize their BS.
And, for fun, How The Apocalypse Would Happen If Heaven Were A Small Non-Profit
Are you catching up with the world today? What interests you out there?