Some people overcomplicate a subject in such a way that you think that a profound statement is coming, only to discover that you already knew it:
"Walking on a ceiling is very different from normal walking," Stanislav Gorb of the Max Planck institute for Metals research, Germany, says in a press release, "because gravity tends to pull an inverted insect away instead of pressing it to the surface." Thanks for the insight.
Other people get into an angry rage in a debat that is supposed to be light and for the interest of the audience.
Extract from New Scientist
Sparring physicists provided some entertainment at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, held last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Physicists Andrei Linde, Michio Kaku, Lisa Randall, Lawrence Krauss and Virginia Trimble tussled over the theme "Universe: One or Many?" taking a packed audience on a dizzying trip to the farthest reaches of cosmological imagination. Sometimes the trip was too unsettling even for the physicists themselves.
Kaku, of the City University of New York, spoke at one point of the possibility of tunnelling into other universes through space-time foam, harnessing the power of negative energy. "Genesis happens all the time," he said. "Continuous genesis in an ocean of Nirvana, and the ocean is 11-dimensional hyperspace."
As Kaku spoke, Krauss, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, looked on as if he was about to have an aneurysm. He turned to Kaku. "If there are an infinite number of universes," he declared, "I can’t imagine one in which I agree with what you just said."
During the question and answer session, a young member of the audience asked if our universe was the first in the tree of branching universes projected on the backdrop behind the speakers. "It’s extraordinarily unlikely that we live in the first universe," Linde, of Stanford University, explained. "We live in the middle of infinity."
That was too much for the chair of the evening, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium of New York. "We live in the middle of infinity?" he repeated. "Did those words just come out of your mouth?"
This one doesn't bug me in particular, but I'm sure someone out there finds my posting of it in the thread annoying, and will proceed to add "Bullet Magnet" to their list of irritating things.
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