David Foster Wallace, dead at 46
Author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion. Roughly two hours ago, his wife found him at home, an apparent suicide by hanging. According to the NY Review of Books, his works had given us “a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok.”
“You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” –Infinite Jest
And, I think, his greatest contribution to the contemporary literary world was his palpable frustration and vehement rebuttals of our current writers’ (i.e. Dave Eggers, The Believer, David Sedaris, etc.) obsession with irony:
“[It] tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’” –E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
let’s see how elegant this universe really is…
The collider is the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date. It rests 300 feet beneath the Swiss-French border and is 16.8 miles long.
The New York Times states CERN’s aspirations thusly: “Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the mysterious invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.”
Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescopeof inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.
Check out these sites for more info:
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
One last word (or warning?): Some theorists are worried that the scientists at CERN have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Over the past three years, they have filed many lawsuits against CERN – all of which have been dismissed.
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