As one who has spent ~ a half-life in and around cute accelerators of all sizes, chatted with a few Giants and lots of elves, seen Feynman lecture, watched RA Millikan-emeritus wandering about the campus ...

Seeing your screed striking at the very roots! of all those fun toys, Tektonix oscilloscopes and pSec pulse generators (now fSec..) causes me to wonder at -










Our sanity! That is - pretty much agree; reading a super-string paper is reminiscent of a Lacan paper or often, a M$ hourly Press-Release. Too. And it *IS* mental masturbation: the math is unmappable to anything the brain might conceptualize ('cept for you math types with disarrayed chromosomes and +/-/maybe circuits in wetware).

Besides - via 1st-degree hearsay from a cohort still at one o' those National Lab thingies: that place now sports more Intel, IBM "groups" (tryin for that 10 nM Big Semiconductor Succe$$ on govmint infrastructure, natch) than group names like Segr\ufffd, Alvarez et al. These Corps now have their 'own' synchrotron light source for playing mask games..

Fat lot that has to do with Basic Research\ufffd. So whether or not nuclear physics is the seminal fountainhead for all Good Thought [??] - for being so 'basic': apparently the Billy n'Bally virus has spread bizness "ethics" all the way through to the seducation of the NLs (at least my old one) --> $^%&#* $$-production.. never mind Boson production.

So I agree, kill 'em off. Even if they aren't hurting anybody in their dalliances. Except by retarding funding of [_?_] (A fuck of a lot more than can be said for) -

That which I imagine I see also: the second-edge of that two-edged sword that masquerades under the rubric, information technology - and deem *that* perhaps the most palpably bizness-corruptible of all the rubrics extant - but it's likely too late to back out of this nascent dystopia.

Too many entrenched Billionaires/Corps are already doing the selecting of priorities (presidents are EZ). Add rampant overpopulation and antediluvian opposition to even birth control = we may as well masturbate with Information Theory\ufffd for enough decades to refine the grazing of the less and less effective sheep.

Some of us will be dead before that vision (or is it a sight?) achieves final robotization. You can hear the precursors though: ever notice how 'workers' are being trained to deliver their spiels in more and more machinelike cadences? Airport announcements and employee responses? Your own employer training desk folk?

So will grabbing the physics funds save us from Orwell?
I really don't know.. but think maybe just throwing the funds in the Marianas Trench? would beat funding "The Information Age". It's such a conceptual crock - it makes physics genuinely scintillating in its brilliance..



Ashton
But I come here to bury C\ufffdsar, not to praise him.