This does tease us a bit at least since mono-pole magnetism would supposedly lead us to our elusive flying car and more important to flying saucers that could travel to Mars in weeks vs years.

Of course it would seem that the discovery is many years away from flooding us with technology in the way that transistor research changed things in the 60s.

Not every good post here gets responses. Unlike Facebook, there’s no “like” button. Most of us have been putting stuff on this board, so that’s good.

I’m following the space field quite closely, particularly the various new players (including the Chinese).

We have been too preoccupied with other matters on this site, we have lost our way, and those who used to come here seeking to celebrate the exploration of space have gone elsewhere.

The conversation shifted to other topics, themes which reflected other interests and concerns, self-centered obsessions and petty conflicts and divisions among our contributors.

This forum has only followed the society as a whole. The dialog has drifted away from space because the nation has begun to abandon that great adventure, and perhaps because those who should have led that quest now prefer to monopolize the conversation and talk about their own parochial obsessions. We didn’t just “lose that core”, we drove them away. They left in frustration and disgust.

I don’t blame them.

It may be not only that some matters are difficult to understand but that we’ve lost the core which enjoyed “Space”.

In a way, this is good. It suggests that science is making real progress, that it is moving closer to answering the questions that really matter. But the problem remains, what good will those answers be if only a tiny handful of us can understand them?

There was a time when any educated man could read Newton or Darwin, Marx or Freud, and gain an insight into the mind of god. Today we must face the fact that for most of us, the truth will be hidden from us, no matter how well-rounded and aware we are. Not only are we incapable of understanding what the specialists tell us, we are totally unqualified to challenge them critically or philosophically.
What if the physicists are totally wrong about the Higgs? Only the physicists are now allowed to say so. A thinking and concerned mind, even a prepared one, is still allowed to conjecture and discuss some topics, but whole fields of intellectual inquiry are being barred from more and people.

Bowser is right. He has failed to get the “certificate of authenticity”.