{"id":4538,"date":"2012-04-01T12:45:37","date_gmt":"2012-04-01T16:45:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4538"},"modified":"2012-04-01T12:45:37","modified_gmt":"2012-04-01T16:45:37","slug":"nothingness-in-la-on-april-fools-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4538","title":{"rendered":"Nothingness in LA on April Fool’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

The media and blogosphere today are full of April Fool’s Day jokes of various degrees of funniness. Then there’s the Los Angeles Times, which used the date to publish a piece by Lawrence Krauss entitled A Universe Without Purpose<\/a>. It promotes the argument that the multiverse is science’s answer to religion, with in this case backing coming even from the LHC:<\/p>\n

Out of this radically new image of the universe at large scale have also come new ideas about physics at a small scale. The Large Hadron Collider has given tantalizing hints that the origin of mass, and therefore of all that we can see, is a kind of cosmic accident. Experiments in the collider bolster evidence of the existence of the “Higgs field,” which apparently just happened to form throughout space in our universe; it is only because all elementary particles interact with this field that they have the mass we observe today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe it’s just my defective sense of humor, but I’m not finding this funny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The media and blogosphere today are full of April Fool’s Day jokes of various degrees of funniness. Then there’s the Los Angeles Times, which used the date to publish a piece by Lawrence Krauss entitled A Universe Without Purpose. It … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4538"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4540,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538\/revisions\/4540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}