Comments on: Islamic Pakistan has no need of scientists

By: John K

John K — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:38:54 +0000

On reflection you are right, I hereby repudiate my previous comment and embrace diversity with enthusiasm.

By: 'Nuke' Gray

'Nuke' Gray — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:41:14 +0000

You can’t go round making true statements like that! You need to qualify it with lots of maybe, and it-seems-like, and I-don’t-want-to-sound-negative. Somewhere, a hate-crimes commisar is rubbing his/her/its hands together in glee over those comments.

By: John K

John K — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:13:14 +0000

I think we might be saying that Islam is the problem. Nothing new there.

By: 'Nuke' Gray

'Nuke' Gray — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 01:34:23 +0000

Except, John, that the Muslims had enough numbers to want a state of their own. As a Libertarian, I tend to favour secessionist movements. Also, muslim ideology decrees that muslims should not be subjects of any other religion- so they would always campaign for a separate state, anyway.

By: John K

John K — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:52:30 +0000

It would have surely been better if there had never been such a sectarian state in the first place. Muslims were to be found across the Indian Empire, there was no need to create an artificial Muslim state.

By: 'Nuke' Gray

'Nuke' Gray — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 01:38:54 +0000

John K- why should the Indians be saddled with such a vexacious state? Wouldn’t it’s own troubles then be even worse?

By: John K

John K — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:14:49 +0000

Can anyone argue that the whole concept of Pakistan wasn’t a mistake?

By: Paul Marks

Paul Marks — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:17:48 +0000

Natalie – agreed.

By: Gordon Walker

Gordon Walker — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:28:32 +0000

On a lghter note there is the francophobe personal hygiene libel; “La république n’a pas besoin de savon.”

By: David Gillies

David Gillies — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 03:19:13 +0000

He still had an office in the Blackett Laboratory when I was there 1989-92. Pretty cool to have a Nobel Prize winner in the department (there might be a fourth if Tom Kibble gets a bit of the Higgs one.)

The sooner we come to terms with the fact that Pakistan is not an ally, but the principal enemy nation, the better.

By: 'Nuke' Gray

'Nuke' Gray — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 02:27:21 +0000

At last, someone gets it!!! Who needs scientists? They only cause trouble! Wouldn’t the world be better off if Einstein hadn’t found out that E=MCsquared?

By: Michael Jennings

Michael Jennings — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:50:06 +0000

From the Telegraph article you link to:

So this summer as scientists closed in on the Higgs boson and while India expressed pride in the role of Satyendra Nath Bose, a physicist who gave part of his name to the elusive particle, Pakistan failed to mark their man’s contribution.

I won’t be too hard on the journalist, because it is made clear that he is a Pakistan specialist rather than a science journalist, but that’s s distortion.

Bose described and gave his name to an entire class of particles called bosons, of which the Higgs Boson is only one example. All elementary particles are either bosons or fermions, and Bose also formulated the statistical description of the behaviour of bosons, along with Albert Einstein (Bose-Einstein statistics). (Fermions are described by Fermi-Dirac statistics, and if you are a physicist, one has to say that Einstein, Fermi, and Dirac make impressive company).

Although you could say that Bose made a contribution to the discovery of the Higgs Boson, what he did was actually much greater than that. The Indians did indeed take pride in this in the context of the Higgs Boson, but non-physicist Indians did not take nearly enough pride.

Still, that is only because they did not understand it well enough. One cannot imagine Indians failing to take pride in the achievements of one of their countrymen because he belonged to the wrong religious sect, thankfully.