08 July 2012

All-Class



"Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body."


04 July 2012

universe and nothing




She came to physics from an education steeped in ancient Greek, philosophy and the history of art – she had also trained as a pianist at the Milan Conservatory. But she ultimately chose physics to answer the big question of why things are as they are. "Physics is, unfortunately, often seen as a male subject; sterile and without charm or emotion," she told the Cern magazine. "But this is not true, because physics is art, aesthetics, beauty and symmetry."

 Ian Sample on Fabiola Gianotti


More than this, however, the Higgs field implies that otherwise seemingly empty space is much richer and weirder than we could have imagined even a century ago, and in fact that we cannot understand our own existence without understanding “emptiness” better.