i just dropped a full bottle of rum on the floor and it smashed into a million pieces

relate your stories about breaking bottles of liquor by mistake and/or spilling drinks here

Ha ha, I once dropped a litre of peppermint schnappes on the floor of the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street, and it broke, and every bum in the place laughed and started following me around because it was obvious that I was carrying a duty free bag full of LOADS OF BOOZE.

you did give a good chase tho, hats off

At the end of term at college I bought 2 bottles of port for my dad. He was helping me pack my stuff into the car and was pulling the special trolley across the bumpy stone quad with the port lovingly resting on top. Obviously the port fell on the floor and left a massive porty bloodlike stain on the ancient steps of college for about 5 years. Also my dad was upset as he is very partial to port.

Get down on your hands and knees and suck up the neat rum through a straw! (Put a tissue over the end of the straw so you don't ingest any glass shards, obv.

if you were brian greene of "theory of everything" fame you wd "reverse the quantum film" at this point, to dramatise the difficult scientific idea of "time going backwards"

small mark s once helped mum and dad s unload the shopping wearing giant fuzzy mittens and dropped a bottle of "tigermilk" which smashed into the million requisite pieces

he wz berated as giant fuzzy mittens dampen the reverse-quantum effect

brian greene - king patronising twat of science

I smashed a bottle of kecap manis all over my kitchen floor recently. OK thats not booz, but hell did it make a sticky mess!

ILE is the only place that can turn a drinking thread into a discussion of Science...

(Was Theory Of Everything on last night, and did I miss it? Oh no.)

sunday, it was. I was hoping for the pay off for watching the annoying recap of physics to date in the first week but he managed to bang on for an hour about string theory for a whole hour without revealing anything more than it being far too complicated for you puny mortals watching channel 4 on a sunday night. Bring back Equinox.

Which is usually what people discussing string theory end up doing. They NEEEEED to have a Grand Unification Theory so badly that they are willing to go all kinds of theoretical lengths to justify it. Sigh.

Has anyone ever considered that the universe is not elegant and may be a nasty mess and what happens in black holes may be something completely different to what happens in the more normal bits of the universe.

i had no idea that TOE was a bleddy series - so what happened after ep 1? who turned out to be the traitor, etc?

That's exactly what I thought, Ed.

ep 2, history of string theory in 70s and 80s ooh its got lots of dimensions, we can't get it below ten though and 426 means we have no anomalies but no way are we going to let you know what these were. Strings wiggle, look at our lovely wiggling string graphics, and let us blind you with our lift down to the secret quantum level, ooh and didn't scientists look funny in the 70s and 80s but we still won't tell you anything about our secret grand unifying theory of everything but look at our 2d representation of what 10 dimensions all wrapped up would look like if you had more than the puny brain power of an ant your mind could get around the concept you worthless scum mortals

Wasn't string theory debunked or was that A) only superstring theory or B) wishful thinking on my part?

String theory is wonderful, it can't be debunked because noone has yet come up a way to test it by experimentation or observation. This is what the only anti string theorist on the programme said. He also said that there were physicist and string theorists but string theorists were in no way physicists, just jumped up mathematicians.

There also might be an infinite number of string theories that work (in terms of unification).

ed you should post on proven by science!!

I will I will, promise.

Who was the philosopher/movement (Ayer? Logical something-ism) who came up with the idea that if a statement cannot be proved or disproved, then it is essentially meaningless. Thus debunking religion in one fell swoop.

Therefore we can use this Logicals Whatsitism to debunk this "science" of string theory as well.

Oh and Prof./Dr Anti String Theory also accused String theorist of being merely philosophers.

Well, technically according to Ayer, (I'm pretty sure it was Ayer because HSA started shouting at me about it after finding all the Ayer books in Blackheath) they *are* just philosophers.

If you discount religion, then you also discount string theory, hoisted with the same petard.

This has nothing to do with booze, though - can we please go back to mourning the alcohol abuse of spilled drinks?

Dr Anti String Theory = Sheldon Glashow, who has a lot invested in the quark malarkey (not so far mentioned, i don't think)

one of the opportunities here that they missed, actually, is "what if it's all a mess?" - a nicely visualised thought-experiment to dramatise what things wd be like if the theory CAN'T be unified.

Ayer is an idiot.

Quantum theorists are a bit smug though, 'every particle we have predicted will exist we have then found by smashing things together'. Perhaps they should predict some completely non scientific particles and see if, with enough smashings they can find one. The could look for the particles that transmit love, or disgust or something.

the logical positivists always had real trouble with the existential status of mathematics, bcz it obviously successfully used (by-definition undemonstratable) devices like infinity

the existential status of the further (tiny, 'closed-loop') dimensions beyond the four is identical to the existential status of the "force of gravity", a clearly occult suggestion (action-at-a-distance = magic not science) which solves a lot of problems mathematically but is meaningless in ayer-terms

also the "what if it's messy" worry REALLY kicks in bad with atom-smashing: ie what if there's no connection or order whatever to this growing menagerie of particles? (= CERN's funding cut instantly)

Thank you for explaining that, Mark. Because I had this knee-jerk "but that's... that's wrong!" sputter type reaction to Ayer when HSA trotted out Ayer in arguments. (Usually to debunk things that meant something to me, i.e. religion.) So it's good to know that blind acceptance of Ayer also debunks many things that HSA does actively care about, i.e. Mathematics.

Mathematics and Science are all a search for perfection that just leads back to an almost religion-like search for god. You just don't get the satisfaction of an ordered universe without taking some things on faith alone. Either you accept the inherant messyness and chaos of the universe (and go mad cause the human mind can't cope) or else you impose some kind of arbitrary unprovable thing (the concept of infinity, string theory, theology) in order to make it understandable to puny human minds.

I don't think it's a question of "string theory is too complicated to explain to you mere mortal non-maths types!" but more a question of *IF* they were forced to explain it in terms that everyone (even C4 watchers) could understand, then they would be forced to admit that some of it is founded on Faith (even if mathematical faith) rather than pure science, like they would like to pretend.

oddly enough i think the talking hedz are much cooler with the faith aspect than the prog-makers

(one of them - john schwartz - basically sed "even when it was all contradictions and anomalies and everyone else said the hell with it this is totally fuXoRed, i just kinda felt string theory was cool....")

Logical +ism has a problem with logical +ism though (i.e. reflexivity) in that it itself "cannot be proved or disproved, then it is essentially meaningless" or something along those lines.

I wouldn't say that science is a search for perfection, however such extra-empirical values as perfection and beauty do go a long way to inform it.

I just skimmed this thread -- what the hell, the mother of all sidetracks? Talk about SPILLING YOUR DRINKS, you befuddled philosophers!

ned it's the best thread mutation evah!!

HSA and I had a really long argument about religion and Logical Positivism the other night and I got so cross that I THREW A BOTTLE OF WINE AT HIM - does that count?

(N.B. this did not actually happen, I am merely trying to get the thread back onto topic.)

re: "only a theory" from the Quark fella. Surely they mentioned the status of Quarks as being "purely theoretical" for most of the theories life (even now I think) - the theory even had a "if you could isolate one, the energy needed would produce another and they would recombine" get-out clause. However it was an immensely powerful theory and useful as a working hypothesis, and so on.

I seem to only destroy vodka, which may be a subconscious thing as I don't like it at all. One bottle got smashed at heathrow airport *inside* my bag full of clothes, but hey, at least it wasn't olive oil. Another time, I brought a bottle back all the way from Moscow to take to drink on the way to a gig (as I used to as a devil-may-care nipper - well, actually, I didn't used to drink vodka but rather Thunderbird and Pink lady, the Prince Charles of booze). My friend John was very curious, so I passed it to him to have a squizz at. He promptly dropped it and we both watched, incredulous, as Russia's finest slipped down a Kentish Town drain. Sob.

Slight tangent - I did once manage to be responsible for someone stealing a bottle of single malt Vicky was given as a work leaving gift. Sorry again Vic :(

The thing about quark theory is that it predicted a particle with a certain mass/energy so the theorist knew there would, one day be a way to test this, by smashing particles together and looking for particles with that energy. Where as with strings no one has yet devised an experiment, even a hypothetical one, to test for the existence of strings.

On the thread about losing stuff I related a tale about how I, like Vicky, lost stuff on a Glasgow-London bus and blamed Vicky as I was on the way to meet her at the time.

On that same bus journey, also to meet up with Markelby at the same time, the bus driver dropped my rucksack and smashed the 1.5 litre bottle of vodka that was my Bowlie carry-out all over the platform of Victoria station. I evidently also inherited Mark's vodka-destroying tendencies.

Would anyone else with any bad habits please refrain from meeting me ever, as I seem to just develop your habits by osmosis.

I was cleaning up the place a bit before a party, and had many bottles of booze on the kitchen counters both in front of and behind me. I slipped somehow, and knocked a new bottle of expensive tequila off the counter. I managed, through a series of moves I hadn't ever used, nor have seen since, to catch it before it hit the floor.

I was so elated that I hadn't let it smash, I put it down on the counter and spun around in a semi-victory dance... and knocked two bottles of rum off the opposite counter.

I still feel stupid.