Point of View: Cosmic Molasses

    I’m in the eighth ditch of the eighth circle of Hell now, with the falsifiers. Today it would probably not be so populous a place, for relatively few of us moderns can claim to know the truth (thus how could we falsify it) enveloped as we are in cosmic molasses.

    Speaking of cosmic molasses, I was glad to see the Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter W. Higgs, after whom the Higgs boson is named, does not use a cellphone or a computer — a laudable but perhaps inevitably doomed attempt by the so-called God particle’s discoverer to remain disconnected from the madding crowd.

    If eschewing a cellphone and computer is a sign of genius, which I think it is, I — a computer user but still cellphone celibate — can only lay claim to sub-genius status, which is proper, I suppose, for one who, despite today’s concern for concussions, remains a fan of pro football and of boxing (until the first real punch lands, then I’m for stopping the fight).

    The violent in the Inferno are sunk in a river (the Phlegethon) of their own blood. (I would argue that the vicariously violent, rather than full immersion, ought to be allowed to merely slog along in Phlegethon’s estuaries.)

    Dante, like Aristotle, “affirmed that the particular goal of mankind as a whole [was] to realize to the fullest all the potentialities of intellect.”

    When you read stories about scientists like Dr. Higgs and his fellow Nobelist, Dr. Francois Englert, you think we are doing just that.

    But the question remains: Will we achieve the concord toward which full knowledge aims before we blow ourselves up?

    Meanwhile, I want to e-mail Dr. Higgs and ask him if we should worship the Higgs boson as the Primum Mobile.

    Ah, but he doesn’t have a computer!

    I’ll ask Mary then.