WORLD ENDS IN 2 DAYS!

More playthings at the CERN factory: The Atlas Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. But you already knew that. It’s apparently round about here where the LHC’s proton beams collide.

The London-based Times ran some sort of unsigned commentary today, a flock of fluff in 10 paragraphs.

Why does matter have mass, allowing it to form stars, planets and people? What makes up the extraordinarily large proportion of the Universe that is known to exist, but cannot be seen? How many dimensions are there? How is nature put together? The LHC will start to tell us soon …

Oh, don’t be silly!

We do not yet know what applications the LHC’s discoveries may bring. But even in the unlikely event that they find none, no protons will have been smashed in vain. For the pursuit of pure knowledge for its own sake is in itself worthwhile. In pushing back the barriers of ignorance, it adds to our freedom of spirit. It inspires and delights, no less than Beethoven’s symphonies or Titian’s paintings. It is a celebration of what it means to be human.

When Congress asked Robert Wilson, the first director of America’s Fermilab accelerator complex, about its military potential, he replied: “It has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending.” The LHC has similar value. There is no more profound human instinct than wanting to know, and a world that encourages it will be a better one.

You make a country worth defending by spending billions on an unnecesary experiment? No wonder the newspapers are dying.

SERIAL CYNIC SERIES:
The Large Dorseyland Hadron Collision:

Oh, Hell, Martin Rees, Countdown 9 …, … 8 …, … 7 …, … 6 …, … 5 …, … 4 …, … 3 …, … 2 …, … 1 …, Surprise, no surprise!

“I have no real proof of fairies, and I have no convincing photographs,” Dorseyland visitor Annika wrote this week in a comment on my 2006 post on the Cottingley Fairies.

“But when I saw those pictures, I knew they were real. I believe in fairies and I’m proud of it!”

On July 17 in London, Sotheby’s is auctioning one of the fairy photos as part of its “English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations” sale. It expects to get £2,000, and possibly more, for “Iris and the Gnome”, the picture shown above and in a detail below, which was the property of Mary Elisa Riddick, a member of the Theosophical Society who died two years ago.

She was a friend of Edward Gardner, and Sotheby’s thinks the photo was probably a gift from him. Gardner was another theosophist, the man who persuaded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that the images were proof of the supernatural, and the author of the 1945 book “Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel”.

Doyle and Gardner suspected the “fairies” were protoplasmic thought forms emanating from the girls’ psychic auras.

It was September 1917. “Elsie was playing with the gnome and beckoning it to come on to her knee,” Gardner wrote. “The gnome leapt up just as Frances, who had the camera, snapped the shutter. He is described as wearing black tights, a reddish jersey and a pointed bright red cap.

“Elsie said there was no perceptible weight, though when on the bare hand the feeling is like a ‘little breath’. The wings were more moth-like than the fairies and of a soft neutral tint. Elsie explained that what seem to be markings on his wings are simply his pipes, which he was swinging in his grotesque little left hand.”

In its catalogue, Sotheby’s notes that Elsie and Frances — “the unrepentant perpetrators”, it calls them unkindly — did finally admit to concocting the images in 1983 after the British Journal of Photography published the results of an investigation by Geoffrey Crawley. They were paper cut-outs clipped on mounts with hatpins and superimposed on the woodland scenes.

“However, Frances Griffiths maintained until the end of her life in 1986 that one of the photographs was not produced by trickery, but showed genuine fairies.”

The delightful question remains: Which one?

It’s always wincingly amusing when scientists show up in the media saying, “We’ve got good news and bad news.” That’s in effect what happened the other day when, simultaneously, Arizona State University’s International Institute for Species Exploration unveiled its top-10 list of newly discovered species and ScienceDaily.com announced that the Caribbean monk seal is no longer with us.

One species extinct and 10 new ones found doesn’t seem like a bad deal, but of course that’s just the way the news bubbled up. In fact far more species are being lost every year than are discovered.

And a lot of people will wonder if the 10 “new” species are really that much of a boon to life on earth when they include a duck-billed dinosaur that’s been dead for 75 million years, a frog that doesn’t look too healthy either, other weird creatures like a bat, a ray and a rhinoceros beetle and the jazzy specimen pictured above, Thailand’s very own “shocking pink dragon millipede”.

Desmoxytes purpurosea, to give the millipede its Sunday-go-to-meeting moniker, “sits openly on the ground and vegetation during the day”, probably indicating that it’s toxic if eaten. That, its colour and its “common name” were enough to get it on the top-10 list.

The list is designed to thrill, with animals selected from among thousands of nominees based on unique or surprising attributes, the intent being to promote biodiversity awareness.

The Bangkok Post on June 11 quoted Somsak Panha as saying his “animal systematics research unit” from Chulalongkorn University determined that Shocking Pink — up to seven centimetres long and with 88 legs (one for every key on the piano, in case anyone wants to try training them) — lives primarily among the limestone mountains of northern and central Thailand. Despite its surmised toxicity, the beast regularly appears on rat and squirrel menus. There’s more!

As published by Britain’s Daily Express newspaper, photos taken over the years by American storm chasers Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen.

Sir Arthur C Clarke, 1917-2008