Noisy

Fermilab has made significant contributions to Physics and knowledge. It is unfortunate that its final gasp had to end with contests and mudslinging. This is a familiar pattern in contemporary Physics that produced the last real insight, nearly a century ago. Since then, almost any doctoral student in high energy Physics seems to be able to concoct a theory or at the very least add a new member to the ever expanding particle zoo. The ability to produce data (or more appropriately, noise) has been increasing exponentially and that has provided many avenues of "discovery."



Discovering new things in noise is not new – even economists and financial alchemists (some of them are Physicists) are able to do it. Robust patterns evolve from mountains of noise – helping scientists to discover particles, money managers to create alpha, economists to increase employment and statisticians to find drug effects. Noise is the most powerful attribute of modern world, full of data hunters and gatherers. Every hardware and software company has something to offer in this area – they will round up terabytes, cut, slice, dice and serve them on electronic platters before one could say, "trend." They will provide tools to analyze and conclude, regardless of the hypotheses. They will provide fire hoses to pump data at incredulous rates to store in warehouses of unimaginable depth. They will parallel process massively, string together supercomputers and even provide glimpses of quantum computing - to process noise at ever increasing rates.



A generation, who understands noise, but nothing else, has arrived – and they are nourished by every academic and scientific institution across the globe. In the process, they have killed the last remaining brain cell that was capable of conceptualizing without noise.