Holy Tachyons!

I watched Richard Dawkins' 'Enemies of Reason' programme last night, an attempt to debunk religion and superstition. Whatever one's own beliefs might be, I felt he took a lot of fairly easy potshots at easy game (mediums, card readers, astrology, etc.), and dismissed some very large topics very cavalierly. For someone making a case for Science bringing an open mind to the world, he himself very definitely did not. Granted his view may be the result of years of 'open' consideration, but without proper background it came across as almost as much fanatical ranting as the subjects he was trying to debunk. Whether I agree with him or not is neither here nor there; he did himself a disservice.

Still on the scientific front, I didn't pick up reading the new McCarthy as promised, but instead started Gregory Benford's 'Timescape', a book on many a '100 Best SF' list. Concerning an ecologically ruined Earth's (set in 1998) attempts to contact the past, it is not as hare-brained as it sounds. Benford is a physics professor at the University of California, so he knows what he's talking about. Skipping from very lucid descriptions of theories by Feynmann to 'science' appropriate to his story, it's hard to see where one leaves off and the other begins. To get a better grip on this I looked up 'tachyons', the subatomic 'particle' at the heart of his thesis, in Wikipedia. They're everthing he said they were! If they exist! (And they don't, claims Wikipedia resolutely, because even if they did they couldn't (!!!!!!!)). They still have given rise to much research for things that don't exist. Incredible stuff! And then just when I was getting euphoric on tachyons, he introduces closed geometry universes, and how they might be within our own (and our's within others). Crazy stuff, and worth exploring. And to cap it all off, he is great at creating characters, and the lives to go with them. Hmmmm.