Science in the News

One thing the world can thank all-provident Heaven for, is that my parents were not indulgent billionaires. Had they been, I would certainly, as a child, have destroyed far, far too many model trains. Nothing pleased my childish fancy more than the thought of it. Often and often I whiled away endless summer days, imagining how I would--if only I could--put together the most elaborate, detailed model train lay-outs, building miniature villages, and fantastic realistic, miniature landscapes, with mountains, streams, tunnels, bridges, over-passes, and track-systems, complete with stations and switching-yards.   I dreamed of tiny exact replicas of all the finest steam locomotives (diesel was far too prosaïc), pulling all the most fascinating kinds of passenger and freight cars--and of crashing them into one another in a thousand different scenarios of spectacular disaster.  Fortunately the means of realizing my obsession never materialized; but I assure you that, as a boy, given a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to play with, I'd have engineered the fiery destruction of untold numbers of miniature Silver Zephyrs and Downs Expresses.  Such are the dreams of boys.

On this day The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched on.  the LHC is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons, made from hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons, or lead (Pb) ions, two of several types of hadrons, at up to 99.99 percent the speed of light. 

The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border between the Jura Mountains and the Alps near Geneva.  It is funded ($8,000,000,000 so far, and counting) and built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the hypothesized Higgs boson--the last unobserved particle among those predicted by the Standard Model.  

There are a few questions that occur to me--about why a particle accelerator has always and always to collide its particles, never to think of the coincidence of angular momentum, and of super-accelerating them.  Always just "Ka-blooey! Bang!  And let's get a picture of that..."  Perhaps scientists are, after all, only men who were once boys....I think there's other evidence of that, and in time I will adduce it.  But, for now, also in the news this day,  Social Constructionism takes another hit:

In a paper titled "Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman?  Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures," David P. Schmitt and colleagues, crunching data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, have discovered, just as "evolutionary" psychologists might have predicted--and precisely what "social-rôle" psychologists would have bet the farm that the data would not show--that personality differences between women and men are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. The more "Venus" and "Mars" have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.  Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived [my italics].

The biggest changes recorded by researchers involve the personalities of men, not women.  Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.  

"...Modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots.  That means high sociopolitical equality over all but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains."

Dr. Robert Deaner, a psychologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, says, "[Enduring] sex differences in competitiveness must be considered a genuine failure for the 'sociocultural conditions' hypothesis that the personality gap will shrink as new rôles open for women."