A cockroach says:
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Philosophy? I don't need any lah-di-dah philosophy. I'm just interested in what's lying around down here by the floor, that I might be able to eat. Of course I do have know how things behave as they fall from the ceiling. But what they were doing up there, that's not my department. And what goes on above the ceiling, out into space? I couldn't care less! The dinosaurs here, they keep banging their heads on the ceiling. That sounds like it could be painful. But they've been doing it for so long they've evolved such thick skulls that they don't feel it any more. Perhaps they have reasons to worry about what's out there in space, but not me! I'll just keep scurrying around eating whatever's left down here. |
*For obscure reasons, proponents of the use of effective field theory in nuclear physics have become known as cockroaches, while adherents to traditional potential models are referred to as dinosaurs. Some kind of explanation may perhaps be found in the 2003 programme on Theories of Nuclear Forces and Nuclear Systems at the Institute for Nuclear Theory, Seattle. See, for example, the talks by Paulo Bedaque and Tom Cohen. Historically, the analogy might seem to break down because Weinberg's suggestion that chiral perturbation theory could be applied to nuclear forces was made in 1991, thirty years after Hamada and Johnston used a hard-core potential to model nucleon-nucleon scattering data up to 300 MeV. However the first calculation of the deuteron using an effective short-range force was carried out by Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls in 1934, here in Manchester. Hence the cockroaches have indeed survived the Age of the Dinosaurs.
28th September 2005