is this a natural sentence you just wrote, or an aphorism (well) known to Descartes students?
In fact, I only thought of Descartes after thinking that the sentence referred to the Saga of Einstein’s Brain.
Anyway, i have taken the liberty of re-lineing it for clarity, iambic pentameter, and to clean up a slight hiccup in prosody:
Question that too far,
And you may end wond’ring
If your brain’s in a jar.
The OPERA collaboration has put out an official statement, quoted in this article.
Both. The brain in a jar is a pretty standard endpoint for arguments of that sort. It’s the general sort of thing that Descartes pondered about, but I don’t think he ever used the specific brain-in-a-jar example (his equivalent was an evil illusionist demon).
Heh, one of our elder professors came into my office Thursday morning all excited to spread the news of the possible experimental errors; apparently, he’d just read about it and was now making the rounds to tell everybody. Somehow, this struck me as really – well, cute is not really a word I’d associate with him, but it was certainly nice to share his excitement…
What?! No comment on my poem?
*European researchers said Friday they had measured again the speed of a subatomic particle that a September experiment suggested traveled faster than the speed of light, violating Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which underlies much of modern physics.
The research team, led by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia, found that the particles, neutrinos, do not travel faster than light.*
NYtimes Link.
Report isposted online.(PDF file)