So let’s think about All We Make Is Entertainment first. For those of you who haven’t heard it, here it is:

It works as a rather devastating critique of our current situation. The lyrics speak better than I could ever put it:

We made so much and we let it all crumble
To safeguard our rights to make us more human
Oh this country is but an empty shell
A clearing house for heaven, a clearing house for hell

And the sun will still keep rising
Always deflecting, always disguising
Was there ever another place
Did we ever really exist?

All we make is entertainment
It’s so damn easy, and inescapable
“We’re so post-modern, We’re so post-everything”

If you ask someone today what we make in this country, I can’t guarantee you anyone could tell you. We make some pretty good computer games, we make some world leading foodstuffs (Scottish Whiskey ftw!), but one of our biggest exports now is… TV formats. The Office, Torchwood, Being Human, The X-Factor… we’ve sold quite a lot of those around the world, and indeed it seems that every time the US needs a new show is looks for something here it can plagiarize reboot in order to make up for Hollywood’s dearth of original ideas. Considering the history of UK industry, I find this rather sad, and it’s at the crux of the problem with the entire UK. If all we make is entertainment, how the hell can the working population of the entire UK share in this? I don’t think there is any way people really can as such. Sure, we can all appear on The X-Factor to be ritually humiliated for the entertainment of the TV-addled masses, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m actually amazed at the fact that no politician has seriously picked up on this and actually done something about it. It’s the key to everything that’s wrong with the UK at the moment. Why is unemployment so high? Why did cities across England go up in flames? Why do we have a generation of young people who fear for the future and look at old age with dread, rather than looking forward to a well-earned retirement? It all comes back to the fact that there’s nothing here whatsoever for most: you may want to work, but is the work there? Nope. We have a lot of McJobs, but they don’t offer the dignity and security that so many aspire to. There’s a lot of talk of “aspirational values” and how “we’re all middle class now”, but that’s just shite belched out from PPE graduates who’ve never worked a day in their lives at a real-world job outside of the ivory tower of politics, and just believe that they can fix things with a speech about the Hard-Working Families of Alarm Clock Britain, a bunch of stereotypical people who don’t really exist. There are real men and women and families, and they are worried about the fact that no-one gets it.

I left a permanent, but dull job, to go and do what I wanted to – the much-vaunted MSc I waffled on about for ages. Well, I’ve done it and I’m out the other end now, and what have I got? Well, congratulations and not a lot more at the moment. I’ve taken a while to pick myself up, and today I went and signed on for the wonderful experience of claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, where I go and go through an interview with someone who looks down their nose at me for claiming money from a system that I paid into while I worked. It’s illogical and stupid… and is one of the reasons that so many feel such anger at everything currently.

Could some change come about that could fix everything? I felt that the Liberal Democrats could actually do that. I saw a Labour party that was in love with the City and appeared to be the same as the Tories, both in love with greed and there to cater for the powerful, rather than normal people. I guess I was naive, and thought that the Liberal Democrats were different. Here was a party that said it would stand up for civil liberties, and would try and redress some of the great wrongs visited upon the population by governments of both flavours. I went and read about liberalism, and realized that this was what I believed. I still do… but well… Golden Platitudes again captures it perfectly:

The platitudes they all dissolved
They got too deep, got too involved
The platitudes just interludes
To break the trust with me and you

Oh what a shangri-la
Oh what a shower we are
Oh what a mess we’ve made
What happened to those days
When everything seemed possible
With no-one to tell you no

Where did the feeling go?
Where did it all go wrong?

As can be seen, I was initially happy to see the Lib Dems in government with the Tories. I thought that finally, we’d get common sense from the government and that the presence of Lib Dems in government would ensure that the worst excesses of the Tories would get held back. That was… naive. Instead, we see that the Lib Dems basically serve as the footstools to the Tories, giving them a majority to rip apart the NHS in England, push through welfare reforms that punish the vulnerable, and generally act as if they won with a stonking majority. They did not. I decided that I couldn’t continue to fund the expenses of that via my party membership, and I let it lapse.

I’ve been picking myself up after the disappointment of not getting a PhD place in physics (again) and finding myself having to contemplate jumping back into the rat race. However, after thinking about it, it’s an opportunity in some ways. I’ve gotten salable skills out of my physics education, and I’m hopefully quite well-positioned to do well. There’s also a lot of stuff I’ve been wanting to do as well but never got around to due to studying and trying to pass exams, so now’s the time to do so. It’ll take some effort to get all of it done, but I sat down, worked, and managed to scrape together the financial and personal capital to move to another town and do an MSc, so I can do it again. I can lift myself up out of the load of gloom that seems to have enveloped society, and start feeling good again.

If you’re detecting a certain political bent here, you’re not wrong. I’m thinking things over right now, but I think I might have found something that I can believe in and can actually see working properly. But, more of this later. It’s 12.30 in the morning, and my brain isn’t really functioning well enough to elucidate right now… stay tuned…

]]> http://theanswers42.com/2011/10/13/all-we-make-is-entertainment/feed/ 0 theanswers42 http://theanswers42.com/2011/10/08/yet-another-back-post/ http://theanswers42.com/2011/10/08/yet-another-back-post/#comments Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:37:45 +0000 theanswers42 http://theanswers42.com/?p=481 ]]> I create a lot of “I’m back” posts… well, this time, I am back. Back to life in Swansea, back to here, and back to life outside of university. It all feels very strange, and I’m still trying to process it all as the speed at which the MSc course came and went caught me by surprise a little. So… where to begin?

I don’t really think doing a postmortem of the MSc would really be that productive. Suffice it to say, I learned a lot about some very interesting topics in physics, and I learned a lot about other things as well. I could go off on a long moan about a bad resident landlady that I had and who ended up driving me to move out of her house, or I could spend a lot of time going over all the different courses I did and what I thought of them… but those two topics are quite unedifying, really. Bad landladies are ten a penny, and the ins and outs of the MSc at Sussex University are quite boring. If you’re reading this wondering what doing the MSc in Particle Physics at Sussex is like, I’ll just say that it’s a lot of work but that it’s a great physics department and that the MSc is well worth doing. Brighton is a wonderful town in which to live and be a student, and I’d say go do it. There’s a lot of stuff to see and do in Brighton itself, the East Sussex countryside is amazing for weekend walks, and I’m glad I spent a year of my life there.

What next, I hear you say? Good question. I was almost successful this time: I got offered a PhD place at Newcastle University… the only problem was that it was unfunded, so I couldn’t take it up. Bit of a bummer after all that work, really, but to be honest plunging straight back into it all after finishing the MSc would probably have caused my head to explode. I have to say that at the moment, I’m worn out and wouldn’t have been much good right now… as I’m feeling right now. The thing about doing these courses is that you spend ages focusing intensely and working hard, and then once it’s over it all just seems to dissipate. Dissertation handed in, possessions packed up, move back home and… what?

The “ivory tower” shields you from “the real world”. You spend your time thinking about cosmological inflation and quantum gravity and battling LaTeX in an attempt to get everything done, and then once you come out you realize that most people go about their lives without considering a single one of those things. It’s X-Factor, office work, nights out in Wind Street and worrying about credit card bills for most of the people who I see on the streets around me, and to be honest I feel a little out of place. There’s an amazing universe out there around us all… but most are oblivious to it. Quite rightly, however, “real world” concerns motivate most people.

One thing that has been in the background for the past year has been the aftermath of the recession… or as I think of it, still the recession as everything still seems to be in the shitter. As I’m looking for jobs now, polishing my CV and hoping that there’s something good that a guy with two physics degrees can do out there after all that studying I’ve had to take another look at it. It’s possibly one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen: it’s like a weird cloud that just hangs over everything and won’t blow away. From what I can see, the economic recession itself ended a while ago, and now we’re left with the fallout. The fallout seems to be everyone feels pessimistic about everything, powerless politicians who believe that cutting everything will somehow placate the economic gods and return “growth” to our economy and allows business as usual to resume, and a seeming lack of any coherent plan to end it all.

I don’t really know what to think of it. The media want me to BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID and buy their papers which tell me how awful everything is, but I don’t feel the fear as such. I see life going on around me as normal, and people getting on with their lives. But I only see snapshots, and perhaps all those people I see around me living their lives are really having an awful time due to the recession. It doesn’t seem like it, though, and although the recession did cause an awful lot of misery, the sky hasn’t fallen. We’re still here. One thing I do know, however, is I’ve let my Lib Dem membership lapse. Why? Shouldn’t I have stayed with them as I’m a liberal?

Well, as I said, politicians seem powerless to do anything these days and as I get older I’m realizing simply that the difference between them and wax dummies is very small. They get up, read a prepackaged speech about things like “the hard working families of Alarm Clock Britain”, and then carry on in their merry little way without actually thinking about what real life outside of the House of Commons, Holyrood or the Senedd is like. I can’t really see a point in giving them money… any of them. I felt that possibly the Lib Dems might have some exciting new ideas that Labour or the Tories didn’t have, but 18 months of coalition government has just shown that it’s all business as usual. I suppose one day I might decide that I want to support another political party, but I think I’d have to think long and hard about doing it.

So that’s what’s up with me these days. Although I’m still working on what to do next, I do have some ideas, and one of them is an overhaul of this place. I think that I might like to extend it beyond just being a blog and actually try and put a bit more up, but I haven’t worked the how and why of it yet. But that, like all things, will come in time…

I’m finishing up my MSc dissertation, typing equations frantically into LaTeX in an effort to get my bloody dissertation typed up before the deadline (next week) and hoping that everything I’ve done this year all comes together well in the end (which of course, it will).

So I’ve been away, hard at work… and I haven’t forgotten about you, blog. I’ve just had bigger things to concern me right now than updating you. But soon my MSc will be done, soon I will have spare time, and soon we’ll be able to talk again about all the weird and wonderful things, all the joy, all the heartbreak and everything that’s been in the big freakin’ gap that’s been 2011.

See you soon…

I’m tired after the big move (which was today), but I’m back and ready to continue. In fact, I’m going to write a bit more about it as I think there’s a good amount of material in there, but I’m going to have to do that tomorrow as I’m completely knackered…

But I am back.

So, it’s been a bit of a while since I’ve updated… 17 days in fact. The main reason is that I’ve actually started on the MSc, with exercise sheets, projects and everything now demanding attention. It’s been a little while since I last had to worry about all that, around two years, but picking up where I left off at Swansea hasn’t really proved too difficult. It seems that my brain kept onto fragments of knowledge of group theory, quantum mechanics and so on that I thought had been lost to learning the intricacies of processing duplicate driving licences and renewals of driving licences and so on, but I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised to find that all of it was only sleeping, not dead.

Right now, I have to admit, I am finding everything a little bit strange. It’s a surreal experience to be back in a university environment, back among the sights and sounds of student life (student activism, intellectual toilet graffiti, overpriced university canteens) that I thought I might have left behind for good. But yes, it’s really happened and I couldn’t be happier. I suppose I needed two years out from all of it to reflect on what it all meant to me and whether I really wanted to go back. After doing an MPhys for five years, I didn’t really have anything else to compare it to and eighteen months of working at the DVLA actually did me a world of good – gave me enough money to live in Brighton for a year, and also allowed me to see what working a 9 to 5 job is like. While my the failure of my possibly ill-thought out efforts to get a PhD place (and having to turn down a place on the MSc I’m studying now last year) were a bit of a blow, in retrospect it just proved that usually if you work hard enough, there’s a way back to doing what you want to do.

I’m currently spending a lot of my time tackling the maths of cosmological inflation at the moment, anyway. I thought upon first reading the renormalization group papers my supervisor’s given me that renormalization group gravity just sort of explained the need for scalar fields, the “power source” of inflation, away. It turns out that in the case of my project, it’s actually based around the study of the implications of renormalization group gravity for cosmological inflation which could prove to be very exciting. In the renormalization group version of gravity, the cosmological constant and the gravitational constant become dependent on scale, instead with their values starting to “flow”. I suppose I should try and come up with a better explanation, but I’m still wrapping my head around it myself… but basically, this means that the “flow” converges around two fixed points – one classical giving us the universe we’re familiar with, and a high energy fixed point where we might glimpse quantum gravity. If I can wrap my head around “classical” inflation, I might able to basically find a way of working out some way of finding observational signs of quantum gravity in current CMB data by working out how RG gravity might have affected inflation.

I think I need to come up with a more populist way of explaining all this, really, as I’m hoping to try and refine my skills at science communication… but oh well. Basically, I’m back at university, studying cool things, and more or less enjoying myself. The long hours of boring driving licence work have finally paid off.

Aside from that, I’ve also handed in my course choices and been assigned a topic for my MSc project, the snappily titled “Cosmology in the renormalization group approach to gravity”. This is basically the cosmological consequences of applying the renormalization group, a mathematical trick which allows you to look at physical systems at different distance scales, to the gravitational force. I have to confess that until encountering this I wasn’t aware of a renormalization group version of quantum gravity, but now I’m doing it I have to say I’m finding it quite interesting, albeit there’s not too much I understand at the moment. But still, that’s what reading’s for I guess. There’s plenty of papers to wade through, so I’ve been making use of a little bit of quiet time to try and get my head around some bits which I think could be important. Whether what I think is important is actually important is anybody’s guess right now, although the review articles I’ve found seem to return to the same point so I think there’s a good chance I’m right.

I have been a little homesick to start with, mainly during the fresher’s week beforehand in which I had nothing to do. However, next week lectures begin and then I’m fully back in the swing of university life, at least for a year. What happens after all this is anybody’s guess right now…

One good thing that has helped keep down the whole homesickness thing, however, is Skype. I’ve been having nightly Skype conversations with my parents, and I have to say it’s not too bad as a result. If I want to talk to home, all I have to do is fire up Skype and it’s almost like having them right here, albeit as disembodied voices rather than actually being physically present. Ah, the wonders of technology!

I’m going to get back to working on my project, now, but throughout the year there’ll be updates on this thing as I feel I haven’t written enough about physics, rather just random blah which has been my life for quite a bit now. But now I’m actually doing something interesting, we’ll be discussing science!