I heart Fermi

[cefirus]

The rest of my weekend was actually not so bad, except that I realized I am a total academic nerd. Meeting Wendy Doniger and wandering around the Divinity School halls was oodles more exciting than meeting Brad Pitt in Beverly Hills would be.  I took photos of the doors and nameplates of several academics that I'm amazed actually walk the same

Comments

[ex_spaceship692]

Great post. I'm jealous you got to troll those halls. NC State has geekiness enough (we do have a nuclear reactor) but certainly not on that level...

An interesting side effect is that your response to the science-based academic culture blurs the fashionably hard-and-fast distinction between faith and science. Knowing how invested these academics are their microcosm sheds light on their underlying assumptions and helps explain why many scientists can have such visceral responses to those who challenge their worldview (evolutionists challenging ID advocates and vice versa, etc). Science itself has usurped the place of a belief system in so many of their lives.

[eldestpredator]

Oddly, I fell madly in love this past weekend with a character who studies string theory and other sorts of astro-metaphysics. Not even a real person, mind you, just the character the real person plays. The real person is also ultra super brilliant and interesting, of course, but lives 3000 miles from me with a steady boyfriend.

Brief snippet to back up: friday night was a grand ball, and everyone had to dress as a virtue or vice. Dressing like a virtue is un-fun, so everyone picked a vice. This woman, the string theorist, wore a gorgeous teel dress with matching mask, and had a green fan with a giant physics equation front and back that solved to NV. I couldn't even think of anything witty to say to her; I just marvelled at her genius.