Luckily the scientists will not mind foolish questions for a few reasons. First of all, they are used to thinking of themselves as pretty smart and the people questioning them as, umm, not so smart.
– Dennis Overbye, answering questions in a wide-ranging New York Times “Talk to the Newsroom” feature.
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:45 am
The only stupid questions are the ones that go un-asked.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:16 am
I like getting questions from non-physicists. It’s usually a challenge to explain physical ideas clearly. You have to avoid nasty jargon, etc. It forces you to rethink a problem and this usually takes you to the core of physical problems. In that sense the questions from non-physicists are much more important to me.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:54 am
There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people asking them.
July 12th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Oddly ironic choice of quotes there, Dr. ‘Ask Me Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Quantum Mechanics, But Were Afraid to Ask’.
You were protesting Overbye’s characterization of scientists, right? Yeah, yeah, that’s it…
By the way, when are you going to give us ‘umm, not so smart’ people the answers to our ‘foolish’ questions? Oh, but you weren’t talking about us, right?
July 17th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
A mathematical why of the Big Bang
Outline
Let Ui be a set of locations of particles of the universe.
U1xU2x …… xUix ….. a set of infinite paths
(Cartesian product of sets of urelements).
this set is equal to the void set by the
negation of the axiom of choice.
So there is no more space containing the particles.
The particles collapse on themselves: Big Crunch.
Then Big Bang.
The Big Bang has taken place thus the negation of the axiom
of choice is likely to be considered as a good axiom.
Adib Ben Jebara.