Davide Castelvecchi in Scientific American:

In a terse, peremptory-sounding paper posted online on September 29, Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow of Boston University calculate that any neutrinos traveling faster than light would radiate energy away, leaving a wake of slower particles analogous to the sonic boom of a supersonic fighter jet. Their findings cast doubt on the veracity of measurements recently announced at CERN (and posted online here) that clocked neutrinos going a sliver faster than light.

For someone who may have just helped to save the edifice of modern physics (if it was ever really at risk of crumbling down), Cohen is not especially upbeat or relieved. “On the contrary, I am saddened and disappointed,” he says. After all, a lot physicists would love the shocking measurement to be correct. For the experimentalists who made it, it could mean that they had made the discovery of the century. For theorists, it could be the start of an exciting period of creative upheaval. “It gets boring if [nature] always works the same way you expected,” Cohen says.

The result announced at CERN on September 23 (although the news had leaked out ahead of time) was certainly unexpected. By now, if you haven’t heard of it, you must have been a straggler from the Imperial Japanese Army coming out of Iwo Jima’s tunnels. Anyway, to recap, the war in the Pacific is over, and a team of physicists has released data on neutrinos they beamed through the Earth’s crust, from Geneva to the Gran Sasso Massif, near Rome, in an experiment known as OPERA. According to the physicists’ estimates, the neutrinos arrived at destination around 60 nanoseconds too fast, violating the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Experts urged caution, especially because another measurement of neutrino velocity—one done in 1987 by detecting particles from a supernova that had gone off in the Magellanic Cloud, just outside our Milky Way—indicated to high precision and accuracy that neutrinos do respect the cosmic speed limit.

In the Economist:

IN DARK days, people naturally seek glimmers of hope. So it was that financial markets, long battered by the ever-worsening euro crisis, rallied early this week amid speculation that Europe’s leaders had been bullied by the rest of the world into at last putting together a “big plan” to save the single currency. Investors ventured out from safe-haven bonds into riskier assets. Stock prices jumped: those of embattled French banks soared by almost 20% in just two days.

But those hopes are likely to fade, for three reasons. First, for all the breathless headlines from the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington, DC, Europe’s leaders are a long way from a deal on how to save the euro. The best that can be said is that they now have a plan to have a plan, probably by early November. Second, even if a catastrophe in Europe is avoided, the prospects for the world economy are darkening, as the rich world’s fiscal austerity intensifies and slowing emerging economies provide less of a cushion for global growth. Third, America’s politicians are, once again, threatening to wreck the recovery with irresponsible fiscal brinkmanship. Together, these developments point to a perilous period ahead.

Most of the blame for this should be heaped on the leaders of the euro zone, still the biggest immediate danger. The doom-laden lectures from the Americans and others in Washington last week did achieve something: Europe’s policymakers now recognise that more must be done. They are, at last, focusing on the right priorities: building a firewall around illiquid but solvent countries like Italy; bolstering Europe’s banks; and dealing far more decisively with Greece. The idea is to have a plan in place by the Cannes summit of the G20 in early November.

That, however, is a long time to wait—and the Europeans still disagree vehemently about how to do any of this.

Aaron Noble. Rainbow 6 Relay.

Acrylic on canvas on curved panel.

More here and here.

Mark Lancaster in The Guardian:

At 8pm BST today in prairie land just outside Chicago, a feat that is unlikely to be repeated in my lifetime will occur for the last time: man-made collisions of high-energy protons and anti-protons.

The final collisions at Fermilab's Tevatron collider bring to an end an odyssey that began in Bob Wilson's (not the Arsenal goalkeeper's) mind as Elvis topped the charts with The Wonder of You; produced its first collisions to the accompaniment of Jennifer Rush warbling about The Power of Love; and discovered the top quark just as Celine Dion was advising the world to Think Twice.

The odyssey ends, 26 years after the first collisions, with the dual horror of the Higgs boson potentially being found to be a hoax and a bunch of teenagers who failed to win X Factor topping the charts. I don't know who is more upset: me, Elvis or Peter Higgs.

I have been working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment at the Tevatron since 1996 but I feel like a spring chicken. Many people have been working on the experiment since the early 1980s and a handful from a decade earlier, their allegiance lasting longing than most marriages. Indeed, several marriages have resulted from eyes meeting across a crowded CDF control room.

PhD students have become professors, hair has receded and trouser legs have narrowed, but the quest for new knowledge has stayed firm. CDF has been the source of more than 550 papers, more than any other single experiment in the physical sciences. This year alone, scientists have published 30 papers using its data.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar, professor of physics at Oxford University and experimentalist for many, many year at Fermilab. As a bit of indulgence to nostalgia, the photo shows Farrukh, who is my friend from our undergraduate years together at Johns Hopkins University, showing me around at the CDF in July of 2004.]

Sari Nusseibeh in Al Jazeera:

The Israeli government's current mantra is that the Palestinians must recognise a “Jewish State”. Of course, the Palestinians have clearly and repeatedly recognised the State of Israel as such in the 1993 Oslo Accords (which were based on an Israeli promise to establish a Palestinian state within five years – a promise now shattered) and many times since. Recently, however, Israeli leaders have dramatically and unilaterally moved the goal-posts and are now clamouring that Palestinians must recognise Israel as a “Jewish State”.

In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry concluded that the demand for a “Jewish State” was not part of the obligations of the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate. Even in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, when Zionists sought to “establish a home for the Jewish people”, there was no reference of a “Jewish State”. The Zionist Organisation preferred at first to use the description “Jewish homeland” or “Jewish Commonwealth”. Many pioneering Zionist leaders, such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber also avoided the clear and explicit term “Jewish State” for their project of a homeland for Jews, and preferred instead the concept of a democratic bi-national state.

More here.

Barnaby Feder in the New York Times:

Wilson Greatbatch, a professed “humble tinkerer” who, working in his barn in 1958, designed the first practical implantable pacemaker, a device that has preserved millions of lives, died on Tuesday at his home in Williamsville, N.Y. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Maciariello.

Mr. Greatbatch patented more than 325 inventions, notably a long-life lithium battery used in a wide range of medical implants. He created tools used in AIDS research and a solar-powered canoe, which he took on a 160-mile voyage on the Finger Lakes in New York to celebrate his 72nd birthday.

In later years, he invested time and money in developing fuels from plants and supporting work at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on helium-based fusion reaction for power generation.

He also visited with thousands of schoolchildren to talk about invention, and when his eyesight became too poor for him to read in 2006, he continued to review papers by graduate engineering students on topics that interested him by having his secretary read them aloud.

“I’m beginning to think I may not change the world, but I’m still trying,” Mr. Greatbatch said in a telephone interview in 2007.

He was best known for his pacemaker breakthrough, an example of Pasteur’s observation that “chance favors the prepared mind.”

Mr. Greatbatch’s crucial insight came in 1956, when he was an assistant professor in electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo.

More here.

Jonathan Schell in The Nation:

At the GOP debate on the 12th, there was another public expression of enthusiasm for loss of life in Texas. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who favors repeal of President Obama’s health plan, what medical response he would recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma.

Paul answered, “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” He seemed to be saying that if the young man died, that was his problem.

There were cheers from the crowd.

Blitzer pressed on: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” Someone in the audience shouted, “Yeah!” And the crowd roared in approval.

A characteristic that these exchanges have in common is cruelty. Cruelty is a close cousin to injustice, yet it is different. Injustice and its opposite, justice—perhaps the most commonly used standards for judging the health of the body politic—are political criteria par excellence, and apply above all to systems and their institutions. Cruelty and its opposites, kindness, compassion and decency, are more personal. They are apolitical qualities that nevertheless have political consequences. A country’s sense of decency stands outside and above its politics, checking and setting limits on abuses. An unjust society must reform its laws and institutions. A cruel society must reform itself.

More here.

Michael Bourne's open letter to the Swedish academy, in The Millions:

Esteemed Members of the Swedish Academy:

Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?

For your consideration, I present to you the Library of America edition of The American Trilogy, out just this week. The coincidence, I grant you, is a touch unseemly. One can’t help wondering if the board of the LOA chose this week to publish its handsome $40 omnibus edition of Roth’s three best-known late novels in the hope that you, the esteemed members of the Swedish Academy, would award him the Nobel Prize in Stockholm next week, allowing the LOA to bring in enough cash to float yet another edition of Henry James’s Desk Doodles. But don’t let that sway you. Just consider the work.

The opening of American Pastoral, the first book of the trilogy, with its effortless conjuring of the age of American innocence during the Second World War, is enough by itself to warrant at least a Nobel nomination. The book begins with an extended reverie about “steep-jawed…blue-eyed blond” Seymour Levov, star athlete of Newark’s tight-knit Jewish community, and a Jew who excels at all the things Jews of that era aren’t supposed to be good at: playing ball, being glamorous, loving themselves. By being “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get,” Seymour Levov, nicknamed the Swede, offers his neighbors, only “a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto,” a home-grown avatar in the fight against Hitler’s fascists in Europe.

Yet in the eyes of the novel’s narrator, Roth’s alter ego, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, the Swede is a plaster saint, a bland, blond cipher. The Swede goes on to inherit the family’s Newark glove-making factory; marry a shiksa goddess, Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey of 1949; and buy an old stone house in an upper-crust Gentile suburb.

More here.

Basharat Peer in Foreign Policy:

The grim story starts more than two decades ago, in 1989, when a separatist insurgency blossomed in Kashmir. India had gradually eroded any sense of Muslim-majority Kashmir's autonomy, rigging elections and arresting and torturing opposition political activists. Gun battles between the separatist guerrillas and the Indian troops were routine; land mines and hand grenades exploded every other day in crowded markets, on empty roads. Fear dominated the streets and nobody stepped out after dusk. By 1996, according to conservative official estimates, around 15,000 had been killed — a number that has since risen to 70,000. India's military, paramilitary, and police forces deployed in massive numbers to pacify the rebellious province, and tens of thousands of Kashmiri civilians were taken into custody. Thousands never returned. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and several Indian rights groups have repeatedly urged the Indian government to investigate the disappearances in Kashmir, but the government and the Army consistently argued that the missing weren't dead: They had crossed over to Pakistan to train as militants.

More here.

They called him the Dog Wonder, the Mastermind Dog, America’s Greatest Movie Dog. He was listed in the Los Angeles phone book, made more money than his human costars and actually came unnervingly close to winning the first Academy Award for actor. He was Rin Tin Tin and, as Susan Orlean puts it, “He was something you could dream about. He could leap twelve feet, and he could leap through time.” “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend” is New Yorker writer Orlean’s first original work since the celebrated “The Orchid Thief,” and like that book, it’s a story of magnificent obsession. Nearly a decade in the making, combining worldwide research with personal connection, it offers the kind of satisfactions you only get when an impeccable writer gets hold of one heck of a story. Rin Tin Tin (Rinty to his intimates) was not the first dog on film; that honor went to 1905’s “Rescued by Rover.” He wasn’t even the first Hollywood dog star. That would be Strongheart, who was promoted as “More Human Than Human.” But Rin Tin Tin was bigger than them all, and he had a story so unlikely it would have made a movie in itself.

more from Kenneth Turan at the LA Times here.

I like this title. It suggests the uncovering of a huge conspiracy, a moneymaking axis on a par with the military-industrial complex or the newer, more sinister military-entertainment complex (which sees the confluence of shoot-’em-up computer gaming and training soldiers to kill without compunction). Unfortunately – because, surely, we all love conspiracy theories – it is nothing of the kind. Instead it is a collection of essays, some very good, some less so, on the state of contemporary architecture and contemporary – particularly minimal – art. Hal Foster, a US art critic and author who writes for the London Review of Books, purports to reveal an alliance of the corporate and the cultural in an increasingly globalised world of contemporary visual culture. He backs this up by pointing to the ubiquity of big-name artists in homogenous new museums designed by an elite group of “starchitects”. It is an intriguing proposition and one, you would think, that could be bitingly critical. But Foster feels, perhaps, too much affection for his protagonists.

more from Edwin Heathcote at the FT here.