Chomsky on the Failure of Postmodernism to Simplify

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (...

 Sir Eddington Doesn't Believe in Neutrinos

Just now nuclear physicists are writing a great deal about hypothetical particles called neutrinos supposed to account for certain peculiar facts observed in ß-ray disintegration. We can perhaps best describe the neutrinos as little bits of spin-energy that have got detached. I am not much impressed by the neutrino theory. In an ordinary way I might say that I do not believe in neutrinos... But I have to reflect that a physicist may be an artist, and you never know where you are with artists...

 Neutrinos

Neutrinos were first predicted to exist as the result of a puzzle related to the decay of neutrons. While neutrons are stable inside atomic nuclei, free neutrons are observed to decay, in an average time of about 10 minutes, into protons and electrons. The electric charge works out fine, because a neutron is electrically neutral, while a proton has a positive charge and an electron an equal and opposite negative charge. The mass of a proton plus an electron is almost as much as the mass of a ...

 Explanation of the Higg's Boson

Protons are more massive than electrons, for example, and electrons are way more massive than neutrinos. Photons have no mass at all. For most us, that's no more than a fun fact (and not all that much fun, really). For physicists, though, it's a mystery that demands a solution. Why are the masses so different — and why do any particles have any mass at all? The answer, suggested several scientists back in the 1960's, is that the entire universe is suffused with a sort of energy field — i...