Thursday, February 17, 2005

Rutherford? Knew bugger all about the history of Charlton Athletic.

I am currently reading Mr Bryson’s splendid tome ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. And jolly good it is too, like most of the rest of his work.

The trouble is, even though he takes great pains to explain current thinking on physics and its so-called laws, I do not believe any of it.

I have had this trouble all my days. I could compose and sing the Physics blues, and given my vocal talents, these blues would depress the listener even more than the contributions of Messrs Robert Johnson and Howlin Wolf.

At school I sat in anticipation of the day that Mr Sutton would come in and tell us that everything we had learned so far had been an elaborate jape on his part, and the real stuff would now begin. He never did, and neither did his successors. I should have guessed that someone so apparently humourless could not keep a straight face for so long.

Yes, dear reader, he really believed all that guff. None of it made any sense to me. I don’t believe in gravity, the Big Bang, electricity, waves, particles or any of it. I suppose that I am still hoping that a cosmic version of Mr Sutton will come along and tell the human race that they have been barking up the wrong supernova for far too long, and the real laws of physics have been recorded by the Blenkinsop family of Halifax for the last 400 years, and are now to be made available to the rest of the world’s population.

Mark my words, in a century or two, the scientists of the day will be proving that the theories of Einstein, Hubble, Bohr et al were as misguided and as inaccurate (albeit very clever) as the way that we view the attempts of Pythagoras and his pals to explain the mechanics of the universe.

I call upon all students of the world to write the words “Schrödinger was a twat” on their exercise books, and refuse to have anything to do with learning physics until such time as someone says something sensible about it.

11 comments:

broomhilda said...

Please post a link to the real laws of Physics.

Vicus Scurra said...

Happy to oblige, dear lady.
This one is a favourite of mine:
http://www.light-science.com/slosson.html
Doesn't mean that I believe any of it, though.

broomhilda said...

You are most kind, I thank you. If I ever make it over to your side of the ocean, I will have to look you up.

Colin Davey said...

Hadn't you heard? The Blenkinsops were quite exploded yesterday by the latest thinking from that Large Hadron Accelerator of The Mind, The Jolly Topers. Unfortunately we've all forgotten what it was & we've lost the beermat we wrote it on.

Vicus Scurra said...

Does the name of the 'Jolly Topers' really have a name connected to isotope research? I suspect that you will find your local public house deluged by nerdy reporters from the 'New Scientist' and animal rights activists wanting to know a shortcut in the production of a nuclear device. On the up side, it will be the first time, ever, in this or any parallel universe, that something interesting has happened in Luton.
I made the same mistake by plucking the words 'Blenkinsop' and 'Halifax' from the nether regions of what passes for my brain.
Broomhilda may have thought that these people really exist, and I suspect that thousands of other readers will have made the same assumption. The following scene may be typical of the disorder I have caused to be visited upon these poor folk.
"Who has that on the phone, our Stan?"
"Another bloody twassock wanting to know if he needed a particle accelerator with a 40 kilometre tunnel, or whether he could make do with some bluetack and a dead pigeon".

Colin Davey said...

Bloody Pfeiffer come round again this morning. "Where'd you want this Burgess Shale?" she says. I says "what?" and she says "says here, deliver 1 Burgess Shale, this address." Bloody cheek, what am I supposed to do supposed to do with a lot of bloody ammonites all over me hall carpet? And I thought she was with you.

Vicus Scurra said...

I'm bloody glad to get rid of her, Dud. Are you sure about the Ammonites? My dictionary says "a member of a Semitic people who in Old Testament times lived east of the Jordan between the Jabbok and the Arnon".
Just watch they don't start moving to other rooms. You know what these Semitic people are like, Moses wandering round the wilderness for 40 years, totally fucking lost. Bad enough with them in your hallway, but the buggers have no sense of direction and could finish up anywhere.

Colin Davey said...

I'm confused now. What were all these semitic peoples doing wandering about in the Canadian Rockies? And did they cause the Cambrian Explosion? And has anyone been arrested?
She says she had to let you go because of the arthropods and you'd know what she meant.

Vicus Scurra said...

I told you the fuckers had no sense of direction.
And as for that lying cow, I threw here out because of the noise she made when eating avocados.
Arthropods? That would be silly.

broomhilda said...

Don't let the fact that I am American fool you, I am only a little s l o w. Hence forth, I shall only believe half of what you post. The other half I am quite sure will be nothing but pure bullshit. I must be on my way now, I have much mayham to cause and vast quantities of beer to comsume. Have a pleasant day.

Mark Gamon said...

I blame the periodic table of the elements. any fule kno that if that thing really was a table it'd have sticky out bits on one side and keep getting bigger and bigger on the other. Very disconcerting at dinner parties.