When your Government can launch a £25 billion rescue plan for a bank and then nationalise or ‘subsidise’ it for £50 billion give or take and no one seems to bat an eyelid, you know there’s too much money in the country.
The 2012 Olympic Games is going to cost £10 billion, three times more than they reckoned. Yeah, but who cares? A black hole of £1 billion has already opened up, apparently. A billion? Sorry I even mentioned it.
Billions go on Government computer systems that don’t work but, hey, who’s counting? Like a drunken tinker we just roll off a few more tens. Yet at the same time we are cutting back on scientific research. A measly £80 million, but the effects are profound.
Readers, high-energy gamma-ray astronomy and ground-based studies of the Sun’s effect on the earth are doomed.
I know, I know, but don’t take on so. You’ll only bring on one of your turns. I was upset too and had to rush outside to secondary inhale someone else’s cigarette smoke before I calmed down.
What’s more – now get this – Britain has withdrawn from the International Linear Collider project, a planned particle smasher.
C’mon, a scientist is hardly worthy of the name if he can’t smash a particle or two. It’s not just a question of swinging a rubber mallet, you know.
It’s a different world all right and one of which I am in awe. Even before the chemistry teacher hit me over the head with a spatula and told me to concentrate I believed in the inviolability of scientific research.
That I have a Teflon-coated brain and none of it sticks simply means I am dazzled by scientists as some are by celebrities.
They quietly go about changing life for better or worse, beavering away until the early hours, with their unruly hair, high foreheads and white coats, quite forgetting to even go home.
They are usually at the bottom of all the technologies on which modern life depends, but we just tend to give credit to Argos for doing a good deal.
Our scientists must be indulged. If experiments to find echoes of the Big Bang in the background of microwave radiation are important to them then we should bung them a few quid and a couple of microwaves and tell them to get on with it.
What’s the problem? We have loads and loads of money. Who knows what the spin-offs might be, but the study is to be cancelled.
Then there’s the curious sounding Experiment to Detect Dark Matter Using Sensitive Equipment Under the North Yorkshire Moors.
Dark matter? Would that be soil?
No, apparently not. It is “a hypothetical form of matter of unknown composition that does not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed directly”.
In other words it is invisible. And it’s under the North Yorkshire Moors? How do they know?
As far as I am concerned they may have made the whole dark matter story up. But can the people in Catterick and Ripon be that confident while surrounded by all that stuff that isn’t there? I think we should best be on the safe side and give them the money.
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