Preposterous Universe

 
Freepin' notoriety

And here I thought the comments at Fark.com on our arrow-of-time paper were a little lowbrow. Why didn't anybody tell me there was also a long thread over at the Free Republic? This comment was pretty good:

Okay, I'm no physicist, but I maintain that time does not exist. It is an artificial construct of man that simply represents the number of ticks from a clock. Somebody prove me wrong.

But here's my favorite:

"Scientists blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah-blah, blah-blah-blah..."

Well, to quote Opus, "Research physicists need Porsches too". You can bet this article will help pull in that federal NSF grant money. Which, unfortunately, is often the whole point of the exercise. As soon as someone comes up with a new wrinkle in elementary particle physics, all the cosmologist's theories will go out the window anyway. But the grant money, that will just keep on flowing. Sort of like time.

From where, exactly, did the stereotype spring about theoretical physicists being all in it for the money? And dammit, where's my Porsche?

~ posted by Sean Carroll at 12:02 AM ~ link ~ ~ ~