A Post Script for October 7th.
A brief political rant. Did you watch the October 7th commemoration from Ottawa that was broadcast on the CBC? I was pleasantly surprised to see that they aired it. The Israeli ambassador to Canada Iddo Moed spoke movingly, connecting the Leonard Cohen song Who By Fire - which is borrowed thematically and inspired by the High Holiday liturgy 'Unetaneh Tokef' - to the tragedy of the murders on that horrific day. The refrain 'who shall I say is calling' was repeated to express the pain of our incomprehension and also the urgency of our responsibility to combat evil. He pulled no punches, taking the government to task for being too wishy-washy in their public pronouncements of support for Israel and against the perpetrators. Next came Justin Trudeau who was thoughtful and appropriately solemn, paying sober tribute to each slain Canadian by name and talking about them individually, giving us a sense of the kind of people they were and the magnitude of our loss. He denounced anti-Semitism and reiterated the support of all Canadians for Israel and the Jewish community. Then Pierre Pollievre spoke, using his time at the podium to shamelessly turn the event into a political rally. It didn’t help that he was cheered on. I was frankly embarrassed by the community, and appalled at his lack of discretion and aplomb. Pollievre ended by reciting a cheesy poem in 6th grade rhyming quatrains which purported to envision Israel living in peace in the year 6785 (1000 years in the future on the Jewish calendar, God help us if it takes that long.) He exited the stage with an air of triumph when he should have slinked off in humiliation.
There is very little chance I will vote Conservative in the next election.
Okay, now for a palette cleanser.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was announced, and congratulations to us Canadians, it was co-won by a fellow named Geoffrey Hinton who we can apparently claim as one of our own. I think he’s British by birth, but lives here and works at the University of Toronto, so we can celebrate, together with the Brits. What makes this even more interesting is that Hinton won for his work on neural networks in Artificial Intelligence (AI), in other words computer technology, in other words not physics in the traditional sense. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder riffs on this in her inimitably sarcastic fashion on her YouTube channel. She’s been railing for some time about how physics, for the last 50 years or so, has made zero actual progress in its field. (I say 50 years because that's when the Higgs Boson particle was proposed. To be fair, it was finally experimentally confirmed in 2012). Instead of experimental breakthroughs, the last number of decades has been spent making up untestable unfalsifiable theories using complicated math to show… well, that we’ve gotten good at complicated math. In other words physics seems to have given up on the physical. But for Sabine the most maddening part is that so many physicists don’t seem to understand that they are working on nonsense because they get paid handsomely for working on nonsense. Now, by giving the prize for physics for work that’s not physics, the Nobel Prize committee seems to be acknowledging what Sabine's been talking about. It reminds me of a few years back when they gave the Nobel in Literature to singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. The Walrus magazine even asked me my opinion. You can probably guess what I said. All this probably means something, about the relevance of the Nobel Prize (can anyone remember who won any of the Prizes last year?) or award culture and the proliferation of prizes for all kinds of things in general (grade inflation?) and maybe about Andy Warhol's famous dictum that in the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes. Or maybe this year's Prize in Physics tells us that living virtually has clearly become more important to us than living physically. Anyway, I fully expect that they will soon be giving the Nobel in Chemistry to a pastry chef in the not too distant future.
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