End of year review, with a celebration of physics, most probably published 31st Dec., 2011.
Of course I like Charlie Brooker and his put down of nonsense, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy his review of the year when I see it.
But I’ll be surprised that out of it, or any other of the reviews of the year, there comes any sense of what is the big picture for what we should have done with the year and our years.
It needs a big picture and funnily enough, the disciplines that come through with the biggest sense of having a big picture this year was science and medicine, and this year more than most physics – even if physics may have destroyed its own big picture of the universe in the process.
For in seeking to establish that, and being on the verge of showing, that the Higgs boson exists and thereby explaining a mechanism which trigged the imbalance between matter and anti-matter, so that stars and planets could form and life could follow, they also created an experiment that shows neutrinos (which have mass) can travel faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum). Poor Einstein – his theories of special and general relativity may now breakdown in general (if rare) circumstances, even if they were good enough to predict a kink in the orbit of Mercury around the sun. Well time will tell, although there was real surprise when a second experiment confirmed the findings of the first.
A good year for physics then (with the possible exception of the destruction of Japan’s nuclear power stations). Bad for everything else, including popular culture which is still dumbing down. And we wonder why TV schedules are filled with programmes telling us how great TV used to be. In fact, the best TV programmes this year have often been about physics and maths and science more generally.
So what of progress for the big picture in general? Helping those most who need most help. Achieving more together than we do apart. Embracing politics as the mechanism for keeping our society free. Tackling the downsides of globalisation – the commodity markets in money and the exporting of jobs if we can’t equip our people for the high value-adding jobs. Preparing for our ageing society. Tackling climate change and planning to mitigate the impact of the peak in the extraction of oil.
Pretty much going backwards on all fronts and we dumb down our capacity to make a difference together. The Arab uprisings hopefully being the one obvious exception.
Even when you want a programme to succeed, like the documentary on Sarah Palin, you are again disappointed with the vanity of the shoddiness of the journalism.
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