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a certain piece of basic knowledge
Sunday, March 13 2011
Today Gretchen attended a showing of some Stravinsky ballets at the Rosendale Theatre, which has been run as a collective for the past several months (in keeping with Rosendale's being a people's republic). Since become a collective, they've tried to take advantage of the space to bring more cultural material to the area, including opera simulcasts and today's ballet. Gretchen was excited to see The Rite of Spring, but unfortunately there were technical difficulties, and the aging hippie stoners running the equipment didn't get it running in a timely fashion. And when they did, they decided to show two less-popular ballets before The Rite of Spring, including The Firebird, neither of which Gretchen particularly liked. And then it turned out that the ballet for The Rite of Spring was really lame, with a bunch of "peasants" galumping back and forth in a visually unremarkable manner. Gretchen had thought she'd be able to get in and out in an hour and a half, but somehow it ended up going on for about four hours. She'd brought the dogs and, though it was reasonably warm outside, they had to spend all that time in the car. By the time Gretchen got home, she was not in the best of moods.
Meanwhile I was in the basement successfully implementing the seasonal thermostat bypass relay for the hot water tank. As I worked, I listened to another fascinating podcast from To the Best of Our Knowledge from probably-at-this-point-entirely-fundraiser-supported Wisconsin public radio. Today's episode was entitled "Inside Information" and deal with issues such as surveillance culture and the availability of information. The best segment was an interview with Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert Laughlin. Laughlin claimed that the main reason the United States is so obsessed with copyright and patent enforcement is that we've deindustrialized, and intellectual property is the main form of capital our corporations now have. He said that as information becomes more valuable, less of it is available. When all a society has is information, the useful stuff becomes impossible to get.
As a side note, Laughlin said something very intriguing about nuclear physics: that back in the 1950s, presumably in an effort to curtail nuclear proliferation, the industrial powers conspired to make "a certain piece of basic knowledge" "disappear forever." The interviewer asked Laughlin what this information was, and apparently he knew, but (because of security clearances) he wouldn't say. All he'd offer was that those of us who understand basic physics should ask themselves: what is the one bit of information that's missing?
I couldn't just let that question stand unanswered. I had to know! At first I thought that the missing information was the size of a critical mass of radioactive material, but then I looked it up on Wikipedia and critical masses of various materials were all listed in a table. So then I wondered if perhaps the missing piece of information is the speed with which a critical mass must be slammed together to avoid a "fizzled" nuclear bomb. It's possible that this is indeed the missing piece; after much searching, I could find no place where this velocity was given.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110313 feedback
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