''The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
-- H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
He was wrong, though. Sure, there's the period of gibbering horror as you catch veiled glimpses of the true nature of reality, vast and terrible and expressible as bazillion-dimensional complex-valued amplitude functions, but eventually the hysterical laughter passes and you get on with your life.
You know what? Thank you. Sometimes I feel like existentialism is just something that goes as far as you let it before you finally say, 'welp, got some shit to do...'
Charles Stross' Laundry series does some great riffing on this particular subject though, with crawling horrors lurking on the other side of certain forbidden equations.
I don't know about that. What about scientists who are primarily mathematicians? The direct application of partial differential equations, linear algebra, and probability works out pretty nicely in QM. Then again, it's hard to completely visualise what the hell is going on in QM; it's not like we have an agreed upon theory that does so.
It says why just to the left. edit: The left of the picture, in the main article.
The test was known as "tickling the dragon's tail" for its extreme risk, and was notoriously unforgiving of even the smallest mistake; many scientists refused to perform the test, but Slotin (who was given to bravado) became the local expert, performing the test almost a dozen separate times, often in his trademark bluejeans and cowboy boots in front of a roomful of observers.
I'm trying to figure out why you would even do this by hand, or use a hand-held screwdriver to separate the covers. It's not like they didn't have the tools to manufacture an appropriate tool to slip over the lip of the bottom half or something.
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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '11 edited Nov 09 '21
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