David Waller

Poor, poor Chelsea FC

After spending approximately a zillion pounds/euros/dollars in the last two years, Chelsea have failed to make it to the final of the Champions League. I, like most football/soccer fans, am deliriously happy about it.

No one likes to see the big spender win it all. It doesn't matter on the sport. NY Rangers, NY Yankees... Everyone loves to see them lose because they spend such ridiculous sums of money to try to buy success. True - in the cases of the Yankees and Chelsea, they have had success. But every time they lose a game, many more people are happy than had they won.

I think this attitude in sport is just one example of the generalization that people love to see the successful fall. This explains why so many people buy magazines like the National Enquirer. They don't buy it to see how happy the rich and famous are.  They buy it to find out which celebrity's marriage is on the rocks, who is getting fat, or whose plastic surgery has gone horribly wrong.

Hurray for Liverpool! Knocking out Chelsea has made millions happy. And best of all, they did it right after selling Michael Owen to another wild-spending club that people love to see fail: Real Madrid. 

Why being a child is better than being a physicist

The best thing about being a physicist is that you get to learn new things on a regular basis. Either you read about other physicists' discoveries, or, better yet, you make your own discovery.

A child can make many big discoveries for herself in a single day. Not many physicists can boast that rate of success. Of course, physicists work on topics slightly more advanced than "how to put a sock on teddy's paw". So the low discovery rate of physicists is a matter of diminishing returns. Nevertheless, the sheer excitement of discovery that a toddler gets on a regular basis should be cause for envy by all physicists.

Today, my one-year old daughter Zoe made an exciting new discovery for herself. She discovered that spoons work better when the concave side is pointed up. Now she can cut down the length of her meals by an order of magnitude. Of course, her mealtimes won't proceed any faster; she'll compensate by spending more time feeding the dog and throwing her spoon to the floor.

I and several SNO colleagues have been working at making a measurement of "Hep" neutrinos from the Sun for over a year now and we still have a fair amount of work to do yet. Zoe makes an exciting discovery for herself almost every day.

Hopefully, some of her success will rub off on her old man. If not, I can continue to live vicariously through her.