THE LEAGUE OF ARMCHAIR PHYSICIST

I gotta admit: I really am addicted to the net. I mean, where else could I follow a play by play recount of all the spacewalks happening on the ISS right this minute? Via my Twitter feed, I’m receiving regular updates on the LHC repairs, and there’s a couple of new Nasa satellites that are downright chatty. Don’t let the fact that one of them is an impactor scheduled to crash on the moon somewhere in the next 80 days or so bother you too much. It seems pretty cheery about that.

Where else could I entertain the illusion that I’m a significant part of the scientific community despite the fact that I’m a complete civilian when it comes to Higgs bosons or loop quantum gravity: hey, my computer’s doing my part searching the universe for pulsars by way of Einstein@home, that’s gotta count for something, right?

And you know, I guess it is funny, how this whole armchair physicist thing bears a great likeness to the sports fan cheering for his favorite teams, that british fellow in tennis, the Lakers in football, and the Canucks for the hockey season. Or maybe it’s more like wrestling, with some theorists wearing the bad guy’s mantle, and others that know how to play the crowd and come out heroes. I know my favorite villain in this analogy: Stephen Hawkins, who robbed us of warp speed!

We should have a radio show, with callers expressing their opinions on the air about the latest particle announced by Fermilab, or cheering the furthest object observed yet, a gamma ray burst from a slim 625 million years after the Big Bang.

(Speaking of big bang, I have to confess that I’m enjoying the latest Metric album, Fantasies, while writing this post and it feels like a perfect bang of big pop with just a hint of punk energy that is, simply put, intoxicating.)

You know, after feeling so heated up, a fan sometimes makes the sad mistake of believing he could do just as well as the athletes whose failing performances he believes he has witnessed. So the pathetic fan endeavours to achieve some great goal, and if this was Hollywood and not the harsh world of real science, he’d prove himself an equal to the greatest experts in the field and manage to grab the professor’s daughter in the process. As it is, the fan miserably fails the test, realizes he really is only an armchair physicist, and goes back to cheering, wiser to some extent and excited about the latest element uncovered by a team of German scientists.

Ha! I dare you to take the test. Are you just men or women? OR ARE YOU: physicists?

Happy Apollo 11 day.
(Did you look at the Nasa? They really made an event of this day!)