Among the Intellectualoids/Quark Bites
Queenan, Joe
QUARK BITES It is generally agreed that Galileo was the last Catholic who really knew Science cold. It is no coincidence that he didn't go to parochial school. At the schools I attended—Our Lady...
...This was not the way to get into MIT...
...Just consider this passage of translucent clarity: "We have no direct evidence as to whether the matter in other galaxies is made up of protons and neutrons or antiprotons and antineutrons, but it must be one or the other: There cannot be a mixture in a single galaxy because in that case we would again observe a lot of radiation from annihilations...
...But folks like Hawking throw around all kinds of facts and figures without any explanation whatsoever...
...This meant not only reading Microbe Hunters and The Incredible Journey but also watching dozens of David Attenborough's bizarre BBC specials, and devouring the four stories about the fate of the dinosaurs that appear in the New York Times each morning...
...Why Mensoid...
...As he writes: "If we add up the masses of all the stars that we can see in our galaxy and other galaxies, the total is less than one-hundredth of the amount required to halt the expansion of the universe, even for the lowest estimate of the rate of expansion...
...At suspicious when a guy keeps using nice, However, if you meet your antiself, be loathe to enlist a professional least that's the way I learned it in round figures like 10 million million don't shake hands...
...The Ed- sophisticated that not even really in-would have fallen to about ten thou- annihilate...
...It's just a little bit vanish in a great flash of light...
...Especially at $16.95 a pop...
...And while we're at it, where'd you cook up the estimate that the mere fact of a person having read your work 25 will "increase the disorder of the million million years...
...Among that infinite number of civilizations there will be one in which an infinite number of people will believe the dumb blurbs that they read on the backs of an infinite number of books...
...If I were writing a popular introduction to the stock market, I wouldn't assume that the average reader already knows why a price/earnings ratio of 24-1 is risky, why you can leverage $600 million capital into a $5 billion LBO, or what the expression "triple witching hour" means...
...million (1 with 80 zeroes after it) par- Here's a typical example of Stephen illiterates—football players—and hire The way I've got the cosmos sized up, tides in the region of the universe that Hawking at The Comedy Store: semiliterates—sportswriters—to write God deliberately created a universe that we can observe," or quip, "One second "We now know that every particle their books for them...
...understood, He would have created a Actually, it always makes me kind of antipeople made out of antiparticles...
...Frozen Star is a 274-page brain-buster about pulsars, black holes, and neutron stars that is incredibly hard to understand unless you went to Amherst, which is where Greenstein teaches astronomy...
...This is why I've run into so many problems reading "popular" scientific works by actual scientists...
...It is also known as The Rozelle Effect...
...Chinese phone books...
...This is the book that everyone is talking about, presumably because the longer you talk about it, the longer you can put off actually reading it...
...This is an infinitely expanding universe...
...A n even better example of this phenomenon is A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, by Stephen W. Hawking...
...blighted with the communications start writing books for Bantam...
...We therefore believe that all galaxies are composed of quarks rather than antiquarks...
...More recently, I have dipped into books such as James Glieck's Chaos, which covers The Butterfly Effect...
...What's more, the nuns and priests who ran our science classes actively discouraged our learning anything about the universe in which we lived...
...In the case of the force- ward Teller Story, as told to Beano telligent scientists who teach at Cam-sand million degrees," don't you think carrying particles, the antiparticles are Murphy...
...A Brief History of Time, by bridge can explain it...
...Eventually you got the message and stuck close to safe queries: what sort of seasoning the Iroquois used when they gnawed off St...
...There are phone books out there that make more interesting reading than this...
...The matter particles obey what is called Pauli's exclusion principle...
...Of course, I am oversimplifying Glieck's book, just as I am oversimplifying the NFL's playoff system...
...Scientists, on the other hand, only get paid to be smart for a living and are generally abysmal writers...
...communications breakdown in their universe by about twenty million too neat...
...And, goddamn it, can't write...
...This is not true...
...Simple...
...I don't object to Greenstein's writing books that are incredibly hard to understand, but I do resent being told that they aren't...
...It is a profoundly unreadable 750-page doctoral thesis masquerading as a snappy, 198-page book that you could give to your mother...
...Ours is that civilization...
...Is OMB the only organiza- dra-like vision of the universe, but colleagues...
...logical inadequacies of the English ten million million million times the in- isn't anything in the Hawking Universe language, not from the fact that they crease in order in your brain...
...why not take a lesson from similar bead on how God views all this stuff...
...What's wrong with old-fash- Stop it, you're killing me, you wacky written work derives from the epistemomillion million million units—or about ioned numbers like 86 billion...
...million million million million million Nothing in the universe is more skills of Sparky the Wonder Dog...
...In an infinitely expanding universe there will be an infinite number of civilizations...
...why fantasizing about a girl's skirt being three inches shorter was a venial sin, while fantasizing about it being six inches shorter was a mortal sin...
...At the schools I attended—Our Lady of the Tramps, Holy Innocents Until Proven Guilty—there were no microscopes, no voltometers, no experimental infrastructure to speak of: Even the creatures we cut apart in biology class were used frogs...
...So In conclusion, let's try to draw a million million million million million lethal than a scientist making a joke...
...What he's actually written is a dreadful, boring, sloppy, incomprehensible book...
...Similar- ever 6.73 trillion...
...This is equally true of Science...
...If you asked about evolution, they'd hit you...
...Which is fine, until they like 10 million million million million tion that still uses these figures...
...Put another way: the rest of us have the right to say: the same as the particles themselves...
...How does a book that is this atrocious get so much attention...
...Of course, scientists would probably universe that was understandable...
...Last year, Hawking unveiled what his publisher, Bantam, calls "a classic introduction to today's most important scientific ideas about the cosmos...
...Seemingly, at some point in 1970, he and a colleague proved that the universe had to have an actual beginning in historical Time...
...Moving right along . . . by Joe Queenan "All the known particles in the universe can be divided into two groups: particles of spin 1/2, which make up the matter in the universe, and particles of spin 0, 1, and 2, which, as we shall see, give rise to forces between the matter particles...
...Isaac Jogues's fingers...
...His book isn't about black holes: It is a black hole...
...Kurt Vonnegut once said that all modern art is a conspiracy between artists and rich people to make everyone else feel stupid...
...Well, not quite...
...Particularly irksome are the assumptions these guys make about how much a reader already knows about the universe before he opens the book that is supposed to teach him all the things he doesn't know about the universe...
...You know: Eins- is so complex, so nuanced, so darned after the big bang, it [the universe] has an antiparticle, with which it can tein, as told to Rip Callaghan...
...What made it possible to get through Chaos is the fact that the author is a journalist, and thus has to write lucid prose for a living...
...Stephen W. Hawking, as told to If God intended for His universe to be "Could you do it on the blackboard...
...There could be whole antiworlds and Cookie Lombardozi...
...As a result of my formative experiences in this intellectual ghetto, I have spent much of my adult life trying to collage together some notion of how Reality works...
...If you asked how God stopped the sun at the Battle of Jericho, they'd hit you...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ty in a first-round playoff game in Candlestick instead of a second-round playoff game in Dallas...
...Apparently the UPI didn't pick up on this item, because I missed it entirely...
...You could both writer's assistance, arguing that any school...
...The Butterfly Effect is the theory that an insect fluttering its wings in Peking could inadvertently set in motion a chain of events leading to an earthquake in Rio de Janeiro...
...it seems implausible that some galaxies should be matter and some antimatter...
...Can I see your paperwork on that, Steve...
...Hawking is an admirable Englishman who has not allowed Lou Gehrig's disease to prevent him from becoming, if the bio on his book sleeve is to be believed, "the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein...
...A good example is Frozen Star by George Greenstein...
...This book, which came out in 1983, is described on its dust jacket as "a magnificent achievement in the history of popular science...
...We should also bear in ly, when you say that "a proton has an what ever happened to my favorite T he sad truth is that scientists like mind that scientists may well live in an average life of greater than ten million number: 765 million trillion skillion Stephen Hawking are brilliant anti-universe in which their un-books million million million million years," quadrillion krillion and eight to the mushmouths, blessed with a Cassan- make gluon-sense to their zeta-or remark that "there are something 31st power...
...on the last weekend of the football season, a pass deflected by a Cleveland Brown tackle away from a Los Angeles Ram tight end could lead to a San Francisco 49ers backup quarterback facing an all-out blitz from a Minnesota Viking safeJoe Queenan is a writer for Barron's...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 3
