While thinking about these questions, I came across a 1939 meditation by William Carlos Williams. Armed with his own feelings of what newness should sound like, Williams (never a fan of Eliot) had this to say about Eliot’s work: “[The poems are] birds eye foods, suddenly frozen at fifty degrees below zero, under pressure, at perfect maturity, immediately after being picked… I am infuriated because the arrest has taken place just at the point of risk, just at the point when the danger threatened, when the tradition might have led to difficult new things. But the God damn liars prefer…freezing… the result is canned to make literature.” I do not want to settle the debate between Williams and Eliot, but in this case merely to steal the image in all its rich problematic promise. How do we make writing and reading experiences that cause us to risk something? Despite its seeming to represent the way the future might take form, I felt that in encountering the app I felt frozen, packaged, arrested, just, just, just at the point of real thought. In the end, the app provoked confusion and ambivalence, pleasure but also disapproval—not really towards the app, but towards the world that was changing so quickly, towards my uncertainty of what this means.

more from Tess Taylor at Threepenny Review here.

W hen Finnegans Wake was first published in 1939, it received over 400 reviews. Critical opinion, then as now, was divided between those who dismissed it as incomprehensible rubbish and those who were astonished by Joyce’s lexical virtuosity and were prepared to regard it as something remarkable. Harold Nicolson declared it “indecipherable”, Alfred Kazin said Joyce had developed “a compulsion to say nothing”, Richard Aldington found it wearisome. “The boredom endured in the penance of reading this book”, Aldington wrote, “is something one would not inflict on any human being.” By contrast, G. W. Stonier while considering the language more difficult than Chinese, said that a patient reading of the book carried its own lucidity, and “where the meaning fades music tides us over”. Padraic Colum wrote: “We have novels that give us greatly a three dimensional world: here is a narrative that gives a new dimension”.

more from Gordon Bowker at the TLS here.

Robert Caro’s life of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-73) is not the usual decorative pap we get from chroniclers of kings and queens, and the power and scale of US politics makes books about Dalton, Macmillan or Heath seem like small change, however amusing the snide and snooty anecdotes. There has certainly been much excitement about this book among the British political class, with several political columnists lavishing praise on Caro’s work. Fans include Michael Howard, George Osborne and William Hague. Even Bill Clinton reviewed The Passage of Power in glowing terms for the New York Times. Caro’s massive biography is the book many politicians would take to their desert island. They will need a big bag, for so far there have been three brick-sized volumes, with the most recent instalment taking LBJ just over the threshold of the Oval Office by about three months. At seventy-six years of age, Caro promises just one final volume on LBJ’s presidency, but his publisher should probably steel himself for more. It is not difficult to see why this is the politicians’ political book of choice. It is not some ephemeral confection that evaporates in the mouth like blancmange or candyfloss; rather this is the literary equivalent of a mouthful of chewing tobacco, politics as it is experienced blow by blow, hour by hour. It’s a slow, vaguely narcotic chew.

more from Michael Burleigh at Literary Review here.

Lawrence Krauss in Slate:

Who would have believed it? Every now and then theoretical speculation anticipates experimental observation in physics. It doesn’t happen often, in spite of the romantic notion of theorists sitting in their rooms alone at night thinking great thoughts. Nature usually surprises us. But today, two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva reported convincing evidence for the long sought-after “Higgs” particle, first proposed to exist almost 50 years ago and at the heart of the “standard model” of elementary particle physics—the theoretical formalism that describes three of the four known forces in nature, and which to date agrees with every experimental observation done to date.

The LHC is the most complex (and largest) machine that humans have ever built, requiring thousands of physicists from dozens of countries, working full time for a decade to build and operate. And even with 26 kilometers of tunnel, accelerating two streams of protons in opposite directions at more than 99.9999 percent the speed of light and smashing them together in spectacular collisions billions of times each second, producing hundreds of particles in each collision; two detectors the size of office buildings to measure the particles; and a bank of more than 3,000 computers analyzing the events in real time in order to search for something interesting, the Higgs particle itself never directly appears.

Like the proverbial Cheshire cat, the Higgs instead leaves only a smile, by which I mean it decays into other particles that can be directly observed. After a lot of work and computer time, one can follow all the observed particles backward and determine the mass and other properties of the invisible Higgs candidates.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Comic actor Andy Samberg, a fixture on Saturday Night Live for seven years who has appeared in feature films like I Love You, Man (2009), was the day’s closing act and slew his audience. Early on, he confessed, “I’m just over the moon to be receiving an honorary degree here today…” only to feign surprise that no such honor was in the offing. In consternation, Samberg then yelled into the microphone, “Dean Hammonds, you lied to me!” He returned to the theme of treachery perpetrated by dean of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds several times more in his remarks.

Samberg ticked off a list of undergraduate majors that “are useless as of tomorrow,” including several humanities fields, East Asian studies, and in fact, “anything that ends in ‘Studies.’” His advice, therefore, was to “study something useful and play World of Warcraft in your spare time.” The fallout from this was that “Math and science majors—you guys are cool,” he declared. “Finally.” Samberg admitted that he might be unqualified as a Class Day speaker, as he did not even go to Harvard. But he had a counter: “I didn’t even apply to Harvard,” proudly noting that he realized he had no chance of getting in. He pointed to some highly successful dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and suggested their examples indicate that “If you’re in this class that is graduating, then you are doomed to massive failure.”

More here.

Via viXra log:

With the discovery of the “Massive Scalar Boson” (a.k.a The Higgs) now seeming imminent, physicists are jostling for position to take the credit. There are at least seven living physicists who played key roles in the prediction of its existence fifty years ago and many more experimentalists and phenomenologists who worked more recently on its likely discovery at the LHC with supporting evidence from the Tevatron. It seems that at least one Nobel must be up for grabs for the theoretical work in the 1960s and possibly another for the experimental side, but the rules only allow for three laureates to share a prize, so who will the Nobel committee choose?

As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it. It’s an historic milestone today.
I think we can all be proud and happy. —CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer,
upon discovery of the long sought-after Higgs Boson, 4/7/2012

Having heard hints
of a never-before-seen particle
my day becomes new
the blue day is further fractured

What were small thoughts become
more pint-sized then the nonsense
of politicians: smaller even
than the bits of stained tile mosaic
under my feet beneath
a urinal

I’m told this is the much-sought-after
Higgs boson I’ve been chasing
my whole life, looking for it between
the pillows of my couch where I
often find keys and nickels or dimes.
Hope surged when I heard the news
my tomatoes perked green
their leaves and tiny blossoms
pulling-in new knowledge
and light

Scientists muse this particle
could be a new force of nature,
beyond sex perhaps;
maybe greater than greed

Who knows what new brick of the cosmos
they’ve found in their accelerator
in unexpected bumps in jets
of colliding particles noted
while they sipped Starbucks
as the white dust of a sugared torus
settled upon the lapels of their lab coats
and the macro-world fragmented
simultaneously with the micro
into something even more splintered
than common sense
.

by Jim Culleny, 4/7/12

John Ferling in Smithsonian:

We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history. Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most significant myths of the Revolutionary War are reassessed.

I. Great Britain Did Not Know What It Was Getting Into

In the course of England’s long and unsuccessful attempt to crush the American Revolution, the myth arose that its government, under Prime Minister Frederick, Lord North, had acted in haste. Accusations circulating at the time—later to become conventional wisdom—held that the nation’s political leaders had failed to comprehend the gravity of the challenge. Actually, the British cabinet, made up of nearly a score of ministers, first considered resorting to military might as early as January 1774, when word of the Boston Tea Party reached London. (Recall that on December 16, 1773, protesters had boarded British vessels in Boston Harbor and destroyed cargoes of tea, rather than pay a tax imposed by Parliament.) Contrary to popular belief both then and now, Lord North’s government did not respond impulsively to the news. Throughout early 1774, the prime minister and his cabinet engaged in lengthy debate on whether coercive actions would lead to war. A second question was considered as well: Could Britain win such a war?

More here.

The Page is a Landscape

I place a few shrubs in the south, (close
to my chest). Further north on a random
white hill, a young woman from the past
sits and plucks petals
from a daisy she picked very near where
the pen touches now.

It’s not easy to contain all one sees. The eye-
fan trembles from strain
and sun. The greatest temptation
is to abandon everything and slide into silence
like a dune, toward oblivion
and I would have unless I had known
the page would not disappear.

This is how we live. Dark
or discovered, by turns. You, me, the bastard
page, beloved, a reminder not to leave,
and the young woman too (grown, meanwhile,
and more beautiful) who has finished plucking flower petals
and floats gently now
between the lines –

her arms spread wide, hair
breathing in the blue afternoon light.
Don’t worry. She
stays.

by Lyor Shternberg
from The Page is a Landscape
publisher: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv, 2004
translation: Lisa Katz
first published on Poetry International, 2012

Adam Mann in Wired:

Prepare the fireworks: The discovery of the Higgs boson is finally here. Early in the morning on July 4, physicists with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced they have found a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected from the Higgs.

“As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it,” said CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer. “It’s a historic milestone today. I think we can all be proud, all be happy.” Both CMS and ATLAS, the two main LHC Higgs-hunting experiments, are reporting a boson that has Higgs-like properties at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) with a 5-sigma significance, meaning they are 99.999 percent confident of its existence.

Though CERN scientists are making sure to be cautious about over-interpreting their data, the results are impressive and historic, and today will likely go down as the day the Higgs discovery was announced.

First hypothesized in the 1960s, the Higgs boson is the final piece of the Standard Model, the physics framework explaining the interactions of all known subatomic particles and forces. The Higgs has been the subject of an extensive two-decade search, first at the European Large Electron-Positron Collider, then the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, and finally at the LHC. Finding the Higgs within the predicted energy range is a major vindication for the Standard Model.

“I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge,” physicist Peter Higgs, the particle’s namesake who first theorized the existence of the particle, said in a statement.

More here. The official press release from CERN is here.

Professor Higgs has something of a reputation for being a recluse. It’s undeserved. In person he’s affable and approachable. He lives quietly in Edinburgh’s New Town but can often be spotted in the capital’s concert halls and museums. He’s in his eighties now, a grandfather, and retired from his role as Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University. As such it’s not unreasonable if he chooses to spend most of his time out of the public eye. Professor Peter Higgs inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel at CERN Professor Peter Higgs inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel at CERN, Geneva A colleague screens his emails, of which there are plenty. Some come from present day theoretical physicists, others from non-scientists with – to put it diplomatically – unconventional theories on life, the Universe and everything. Also to be filtered: dozens of interview requests from the world’s media. He accepts only a few because it would be impossible to accept them all.

more from Ken Macdonald at the BBC here.

I’m personally involved in the apocalypse… It’s interesting how your relationship to that changes in the course of your life. You think about it most when you’re young, particularly in connection with death, because you still have a certain courage that you’re going to lose when your own death is getting closer. Later you’re just afraid. When I was young, I didn’t feel the sanctity of birth. I tended to consider birth as the starting point of a journey toward failure, and I’d sadly look out the window for days on end into this grey light that was all that had been given to me. Anything that could arouse compassion had a great impact on me. I was particularly responsive to those aspects of reality and the arts that reflected sadness, the unbearable, the tragic. And I didn’t know what to do with anything positive or joyful. Happiness bothered me.

more from an interview with László Krasznahorkai at The Quarterly Conversation here.

The composition of Gandhi’s faith, Tidrick has shown, was born of a cross between a Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy, the planchette and the Esoteric Christian Union. The two were not unconnected, as garbled ideas from the former – karma, reincarnation, ascetic self-perfection, fusion of the soul with the divine – found occult form in the latter. Little acquainted with the Hindu canon itself in his early years, Gandhi reshaped it through the medium of Western spiritualisms of the period. His one aim in life, he decided, was to attain moksha: that state of perfection in which the cycle of rebirth comes to an end and the soul accedes to ultimate union with God. ‘I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is moksha,’ he wrote, ‘in this very existence.’ The path towards it was ‘crucifixion of the flesh’, without which it was impossible to ‘see God face to face’ and become one with him. But if such perfection could be attained, the divine would walk on earth, for ‘there is no point in trying to know the difference between a perfect man and God.’ Then there would be no limit to his command of his countrymen: ‘When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the word and the nation will listen.’

more from Perry Anderson at the LRB here.

Sean is at CERN right now. The seminar has started and you can follow what's happening live here.

You can also watch the live webcast directly from the seminar here. (It's quite technical.)

UPDATE: Here is the last part of the live-blogging (local Geneva time given here):

10:40 am (Sean): Personal editorializing by me: we’ve found the Higgs, or at least a Higgs. Still can’t be sure that it’s just the vanilla Standard Model Higgs. The discrepancies aren’t quite strong enough to be sure that they really represent beyond-Standard-Model physics… but it’s a strong possibility.

Fortunately, we have a great accelerator working at full speed, and much more data to come! A proud moment for everyone who has worked to get us to this point.

10:37 am (Mark): So we have a five-sigma result from ATLAS as well! This was well-worth getting up for, if only to take part, at great distance, in the joyous applause at this slide.

10:38 am (John): BOTH experiments have a significantly enhanced rate for gamma gamma. My raw impression is that this is not very Standard Model like at all…this is the most important thing I learned tonight, without question.

10:43 am (Sean): Fabiola thanks Nature for putting the Higgs where the LHC could find it.

At the end of her talk, now there’s even applause in the press room!

10:46 am (Mark): Peter Higgs is visibly moved at the final results. I hope people understand, and perhaps this helps make clear, how invested scientists are in this work.

10:47 am (Sean): Not often you get to see history made.

It's official: they have it!

Here is a screen shot of Peter Higgs saying a few words at the end of the seminar:

From Politico:

Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009’s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party.

Now 17, Krohn — who went on to write a book, “Defining Conservatism,” that was blurbed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett — still watches that speech from time to time, but it mostly makes him cringe because, well, he’s not a conservative anymore.

“I think it was naive,” Krohn now says of the speech. “It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”

More here.

I know that I should probably not be doing this but I am too excited not to: I have it on very good authority from a prominent experimental physicist in the middle of the action that CERN will indeed be announcing the discovery of the Higgs Boson tomorrow in Geneva. Here is how my “Deep Throat” contact puts it:

It's 5 sigma more or less, and I am sure there will be some debate about the semantics of calling it a “discovery” or not but more or less it is a discovery…it's there! Probably the most boring and exciting moment in physics…

How confident am I in my confidant? Let's put it this way: if this turns out to be a “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment for 3QD, I will take on the responsibility of personally assassinating my source! 🙂 And, yes, I have permission from her/him to post this.

We will have much more about all this tomorrow I am sure. What an exciting moment!

Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books:

Like many admirers of the work of James Joyce, I had imposed strict terms on that admiration, and around the work I had drawn a clear ambit, beyond which I was unprepared to stray. Ulysses and “The Dead”: crucial works, without which life was something seen through a sheet of wax paper, handled with gloves of thick batting, overheard through a drinking glass pressed to a wall. Between them those two works managed to say everything a pitying heart and a pitiless intellect could say about death and sex and love and literature, loss and desire, friendship and animosity, talk and silence, mourning and dread. Then there were “Araby,” “A Little Cloud,” and “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” each a masterpiece, endlessly rereadable, from which I had learned so much about short stories and their deceptive power; one can learn a lot from all the stories in Dubliners, even the sketchier ones: about point of view and the construction of scene, about the myth of Charles Parnell and horse racing in Ireland, about the pain of grief and of missed chances.

Beyond Dubliners there was the unlovable A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which starts well, charting bold, clear routes, like “Araby,” through the trackless waters of childhood, then fouls its rotors in a dense kelpy snarl of cathected horniness, late-Victorian aesthetics, and the Jesuitical cleverness that, even in Ulysses, wearies the most true-hearted lover of Joyce. A stamp in the passport, Portrait, a place I must visit without ever feeling it necessary to return, though I might want to wander out now and then to drop in on Joyce’s poetry, roughly contemporary with the first novel, those curious “pomes,” wearing their spats and dandyish nosegays, occasionally taking up a putative lute to croon promises of theoretical love to unconvincing maidens in the windows of canvas-flat donjons.

After that I came up against the safety perimeter, beyond which there lurked, hulking, chimerical, gibbering to itself in an outlandish tongue, a frightening beast out of legend.

More here.

Jim Holt in the New York Times:

Now let me narrow my query: Does anybody read analyticphilosophy for pleasure? Is this kind of philosophy literature? Here you might say, “Certainly not!” Or you might say, “What the heck is analytic philosophy?”

Allow me to address the latter reply first. “Analytic” philosophy is the kind that is practiced these days by the vast majority of professors in philosophy departments throughout the English-speaking world. It’s reputed to be rather dry and technical — long on logical rigor, short on lyrical profundity. Analytic philosophy got its start in Cambridge in the first decade of the 20th century, when Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore revolted against the rather foggy continental idealism prevailing among English philosophers at the time. Under their influence, and that of Ludwig Wittgenstein (who arrived in Cambridge in 1912 to study with Russell), philosophers came to see their task as consisting not in grand metaphysical system-building, but in the painstaking analysis of language. This, they thought, would enable them to lay bare the logical structure of reality and to put all the old philosophical perplexities to rest.

Today, analytic philosophy has a broader scope than it used to. (Many of its qualities were examined in a previous post in this series by Gary Gutting, “Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide.”) It’s less obsessed with dissecting language; it’s more continuous with the sciences. (This is partly due to the American philosopher Willard Quine, who argued that language really has no fixed system of meanings for philosophers to analyze.) Yet whether they are concerned with the nature of consciousness, of space-time or of the good life, analytic philosophers continue to lay heavy stress on logical rigor in their writings.

More here.

Ben Dolnick in the New York Times:

When I was a teenager, newly fixated on becoming a writer, I came across a piece of advice from Kurt Vonnegut that affected me like an ice cube down the back of my shirt.

“Do not use semicolons,” he said. “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

At the time I was less struck by the cranky, casual bigotry of the statement (a great deal of Vonnegut’s advice sounds as if it was rasped between grandfatherly coughing fits) than by the thrilling starkness of the prohibition. A writer was simply not to use semicolons. Ever.

At that point I’d written a number of not very good short stories over which I’d sprinkled semicolons (along with inapt adjectives and “symbolic” character names) like the wishful seasonings of an amateur cook. Now I would have, if it had been physically possible, scrubbed the accursed symbol from my keyboard and never thought about semicolons again, except to harrumph cruelly when I witnessed other, lesser writers succumbing to this particular form of misguidedness.

Advice from Vonnegut was not, to me, just any advice. To say that he was my literary hero doesn’t quite capture the intensity of the worship and obsession I heaped upon him.

More here.

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.