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Halloween, rather like Christmas, seems an essentially modern and rather American innovation. Trick or Treat seems to follow the Sicilian-American business model of extortion with menaces. The Christian church of course had All Hallows Eve, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers. The Christians probably instituted this to replace various Pagan ‘Samhain’ type death festivals in which surplus livestock got slaughtered before winter.
However I grew up in Britain and for me the season seems always associated with ‘Guy Fawkes’ or ‘Bonfire’ or ‘Fireworks’ Night, initially instituted to celebrate the failure of a catholic plot to destroy a protestant parliament with a load of gunpowder barrels on the fifth of November 1605 and retained as a general celebration of British identity as anti-catholic and anti-papist etc, although for reasons of social harmonisation and political correctness this has become somewhat bowdlerised over the centuries into a mere firework festival, except amongst the protestants of Northern Ireland who still take it really seriously.
I spent my mid teens compounding rocket propellants and bangs from weedkiller and recycled fireworks, nobody bothered much about such pyrotechnic enthusiasms in those days. For me like many of my contemporaries it formed the basis of an interest in chemistry. Today one could easily end up interrogated by MI5 for such hobbies.
Despite my distaste for Catholicism, famously described by Richard Dawkins as ‘the world’s second worst religion’, and my enjoyment of fireworks, I’m refraining from incinerating an effigy of the pope on Guy Fawkes Night this year. For the first time in a while we seem to have a pope with some post medieval ideals, unlike the two mad old fools who preceded him, I feel guardedly optimistic.
Incidentally he used to work as a chemist, as did Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel and I.
Funny old business chemistry, it teaches you to think scientifically but unlike biology which has ‘life’ as its field of study and physics which has the entire universe to ponder, chemistry seems a bit bereft of higher philosophical implications, no wonder so many chemists abandon their trade and go on to more interesting activities like politics or esoterics.
I couldn’t help noticing that in upgrading his coat of arms to mark his ascension from cardinal to pope, Francis has replaced a five pointed star with an eight pointed one.
In other news, these mandrakes http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=133&Itemid=137 which I had unearthed because they had lost all their leaves, started to sprout again so I replanted them a week or so ago, now they all have a fine crown of new foliage, and will maybe flower in time for xmas.
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So Peter Higgs (along with Belgian Francois Englert) gets a Nobel Prize for predicting the Higgs Boson. At least dear old Peter Higgs will probably have passed away by the time the Higgs Mechanism becomes discarded as yet another blind alley in the annals of theoretical physics.
This prize for the Higgs really goes as a consolation prize to the LHC effort at CERN, the largest and most expensive instrument ever made by humanity, which has so far failed to find anything to significantly advance our knowledge.
The expense, the hype, and the self justificatory overstatement of results have reached epic, indeed almost Euroscale dimensions.
The Higgs mechanism was devised initially to explain the unexpectedly high masses of the W and Z bosons and was then extended to explain the origin of mass itself.
However as the theoretical Higgs field does not couple to the gluons (or whatever) that give things like protons and neutrons about 99% of their mass then it doesn’t explain a lot really, it creates a bigger problem than it solves.
If the particles which supposedly do couple to the Higgs field all have different coupling constants which the theory cannot predict, then the theory has no predictive power.
If the General Relativistic equivalence of the gravitational and inertial components of mass holds, and it seems to hold to a very large number of decimal places, then plainly the Higgs Mechanism seems in conflict with it.
The astonishingly weak and elusive 125GeV signal from the LHC could arise from any number of things, it seems highly premature to ascribe it to the particle manifestation of a field which supposedly gives some but not all other particles a mass, particularly as we already have an excellent and unfalsified description of mass as spacetime curvature in General Relativity.
I guess that the masses of the W and Z bosons have rather high values because they constitute rather ‘awkward’ or ‘stressed’ arrangements of spacetime, and I suspect that this has something to do with various types of spin arrangement in extra temporal dimensions.
I shall most certainly not eat the relevant pages of The Octavo until I see better evidence for the Higgs Mechanism!
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The EU has taken its first Political Prisoners, elected Greek politicians from the Golden Dawn party.
(Incidentally there seems no connection whatever between the Greek Golden Dawn and the old British esoteric order of the same name.)
No matter how distasteful we may find the opinions of the far right Greek Golden Dawn we must accept that their views arise in direct reaction to the economic and migration policies of the EU which have royally stuffed the Greeks.
Theoretically the EU would supposedly bring nothing but economic benefit and harmony. In practise it has brought the exact opposite.
The Greeks should have quit the EU when the latrine first intersected with the windmill back in 2008.
In fact all counties except Germany should quit the EU, only they profit from it by using a currency grossly undervalued for their economy.
The freedom to form anything other than an 'approved' political party will eventually disappear if the faceless bureaucrats of the EU have their way.
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Arcanorium College, the world's foremost Cyber-Academy for the magical arts, begins its eighth glorious year on September 30th, 2013.
Semester 1 will include:
Chaos Monasticism by Nikki Wyrd, a chance to sharpen up your magical practise.
A Knights of Chaos campaign by the Knights and Dames of Chaos, to attempt to remedy various serious global problems by direct acts of sorcery.
This may appear demented, yet we have achieved some remarkable successes in our previous three campaigns. Volunteers may join us initialy as Squires; the Marshals, Knights, and Dames of the order will provide instruction in the construction and use of wands, sigils, and servitors.
Arcanorium College also celebrates its eighth year with the launch of its Batchelor of Magic Degree course. The BM Degree course includes wide ranging study, the submission of dissertations and creative projects, and project leadership work.
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Just a few odds and ends that have caught my attention this last week or so: -
The mandrakes I unearthed about 2 months ago, these ones
http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=133
have all produced little white and purple sprouts at the top after their visit to the Midsummer Druidry Grove and a rest on my altar, it seems a rather odd thing for them to do in September, my Royal Horticultural Society consultant recommends repotting them now, any further suggestions?
Herman van Rompuy, the nonentity holding the apparent presidency of the euro-shambles has asked the EU Audit Commission not to make the appalling inadequacies of EU accounting so public because it may lead to further erosion of confidence in the EU.
The EU stands underpinned by a malignant but bumbling synarchist conspiracy between elements of the European political class and big business. Any notion of government by the people and for the people never entered into their calculations, and it seems they cannot even do their calculations anyway. To hell with the whole rotten enterprise.
It looks like we will have to wait till 2015 for the LHC to fire up again and attempt to confirm the discovery of the ‘Higgs Boson’. I doubt very much that the weak signal obtained around 125 GeV represents a particle from a field that gives many other particles their mass, I just don’t buy the Higgs Mechanism. GR explains mass more elegantly.
The new particle may consist of something like this in HD8 notation:-
Spin Colour Electrocharge* Generation
+1 +1 +3 +3?
-1 -1 -3 -2?
In other words, something like a spin zero meson, but one whose particle and antiparticle components cannot exist separately because their internal colour plus electrocharges do not add up to 3 or 0. Such a meson like particle does however obey this condition overall, perhaps conferring fleeting stability, and it could break up into virtually anything, as observed.
(* Electrocharge 3 = the charge on the electron, a more useful notation methinks.)
I note that this paper of a year ago has now achieved over 40,000 hits:-
http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=104&Itemid=137
That seems to have put the cat amongst the pigeons.
Pete.