[Ian Iveson[_2_]]

Would a valve work at the dawn of time?

Who would have thought that the answer to the great mystery of the
cosmos was staring us in the face all along?

I can spell thermionic but not the word that comes before "tube".
That's why I stuck with "valve". It's not just patriotism, it's a
matter of science. A tube must always be full of something.

There's a lot of excitement about the Higgs Bosun. Much more so than
with the neutrino anomoly. This looks like a sign, not of what has
been proven and what has not, but of what science expects to find. The
Higgs fits, the speeding neutrino doesn't.

On the face of it the Higgs would be a huge success for materialists.
We objected to the idea of empty space from the start, for the obvious
reason that it has no material reality.

Much more significant could be a great leap forward for the Dialectic.
Some professor was on the radio saying that the concept of
"supersymmetry" could become virtually unassailable. Everything has
it's equal but opposite counterpart. The great thing about
supersymmetry is that it elevates opposition to the status of an
explaining principle, rather than a phenomenon requiring explanation.
Science then has no need to explain why the very large behaves so
differently from the very small, because it can simply identify the
two realms as opposites. Science itself, if you will, would be
expected to comprise two opposite parts. Job done. Now we know
everything.

To paraphrase Lennin, grasp the Dialectic and you're more than half
way there. Matierialsm is the easy part.

Who better to answer the Great Question of All Time but the Butcher?
Patrick, pack up a couple of valves and your trusty power supply, and
take yourself off to the Dawn of Time, please. You'll need a change of
clothes perhaps. There's no use supposing, we need a proper
experiment.

Do valves work without the Higgs Bosun?

Ian