杏吧原创

Feedback is New 杏吧原创鈥檚 popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com

Going places

Earth is a big planet with a lot of people on it, which means that even the most niche of interests can find their expression somewhere. Feedback has a sneaking fondness for those peculiar tourist attractions to be found along the many winding highways of the US, like Kansas鈥檚 gloriously literal-minded .

But we weren鈥檛 prepared for science historian Richard Fallon to to the world鈥檚 one and only (as far as we know) sculpture park dedicated to foraminifera. If you don鈥檛 know what foraminifera are, they are single-celled organisms, mostly found in the sea, which often have a hard external shell, or test. These tests have been fossilised in huge numbers, so the foraminifera fossil record is extraordinarily detailed.

The tests also come in a huge variety of shapes, hence the . It is in Zhongshan, China, and opened in 2009 (Feedback is therefore 17 years late reporting on this, which we will concede is one of our worse response times).

Set in a park on a hillside, the attraction contains 114 large sculptures of foraminifera, among which visitors can wander. The sculptures are a little difficult to describe without thorough knowledge of the terminology of irregular three-dimensional shapes, but if you鈥檝e seen some of Barbara Hepworth鈥檚 more curvaceous sculptures, you might be able to imagine something that is, well, actually still wrong, but not a million miles away from the real thing.

If one goes on TripAdvisor, as Fallon and Feedback both did, one will find that the Foraminiferal Sculpture Park has a听. Closer inspection, however, reveals that this is based on one review, left by a听鈥� and we鈥檙e going to guess this person is the sort of person who is predisposed to like a sculpture park dedicated to foraminifera, since Eudyptes is the taxonomic name for crested penguins.

Feedback would like to see some more testimony on the matter. Sadly, our editor declined our request to be flown to China and back just to check out the park.Our suggestion that we combine it with a trip to the in New Delhi, India, was also rejected.

However, Feedback鈥檚 more pressing request is: do readers know of any scientific tourist attractions that are even more niche in nature? To forestall the inevitable emails: no, the and the UK鈥檚 Vagina Museum are far too popular and well-known. But is there a museum dedicated solely to mosses, perhaps, or an art gallery that houses only Western blot images?

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In the beginning

It鈥檚 not uncommon for academics to put jokes and references into the titles of their papers, but it seems rarer for them to cut loose in their abstracts. These introductory paragraphs sum up all the main points of the study, generally in about 200 words. Depending on the academic, they are either models of brevity or an unbearable sludge of jargon.

Physicist Leonard Susskind, however, is having none of that. In March, he to arXiv under the following header (which we assume is perfectly cogent if you know about this sort of thing): 鈥淚s time reversal in de Sitter space a spontaneously broken gauge symmetry?鈥� Susskind鈥檚 answer, to be found towards the end of Susskind鈥檚 abstract, is 鈥測es 鈥� but with a twist: Time-reversal is indeed a gauge symmetry; but it is hidden by spontaneous symmetry breaking鈥�.

Physics writers can puzzle that one out; Feedback is concerned with the first half of the abstract. Susskind begins by thanking Daniel Harlow and Edward Witten for ongoing discussion, before adding 鈥渂ut frankly in both cases I can鈥檛 tell whether they agree with me or not鈥�. Noting that he has 鈥渙ften been accused of imprecision鈥�, especially towards the end of his papers, when he expects readers to have 鈥渃aught on鈥�, Susskind says that, this time, he has 鈥渢ried to maintain a level of conceptual if not mathematical rigor throughout鈥�, because 鈥淚鈥檓 now almost 86 and I can鈥檛 wait鈥� for readers to catch up.

His abstract has gone straight into our list of top 10 favourite abstracts. The other prominent contender, in a LinkedIn discussion of Susskind鈥檚 effort, is from 2011. Readers with long memories may recall a big fuss at the time over an experiment that seemed to show neutrinos travelling faster than light, which led to a lot of discussion before eventually being explained by some loose wiring.

In all the literature on the topic, one was published under the heading 鈥淐an apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?鈥�

The abstract was just two words long: 鈥淧robably not鈥�.

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Getting a bit cheesy

Feedback must issue a heartfelt, grovelling apology. We missed a trick, and it was a trick so obvious that we still can鈥檛 believe we didn鈥檛 think of it.

A few weeks ago, we examined the ongoing efforts of accounting firm PwC to estimate the future size of the lunar economy. 21 March Feedback was a little snarky about the idea of monetising the moon. But in all our irritable scepticism, we didn鈥檛 think of the thing that thought of, which was that all this lunar entrepreneurialism means the moon really is made of cheddar.

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