Fear and trembling, there be, these days, there in the realm of the Science Men, because it is a-feared that, and very soon, said Men will reach the Outer Limits, of what it is possible for them to Know.

"The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer," Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research—better known as CERN—said during a recent TED talk in Geneva, Switzerland.

Equally frightening is the reason for this approaching limit, which Cliff says is because "the laws of physics forbid it."

The first Problem is the Higgs field.

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics—the two theories in physics that drive our understanding of the cosmos on incredibly large and extremely small scales—the Higgs field should be performing one of two tasks, says Cliff.

Either it should be turned off, meaning it would have a strength value of zero and wouldn't be working to give particles mass, or it should be turned on, and, as the theory goes, this "on value" is "absolutely enormous," Cliff says. But neither of those two scenarios are what physicists observe.

"In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on," says Cliff. "It's not zero, but it's ten-thousand-trillion times weaker than it's fully 'on' value—a bit like a light switch that got stuck just before the 'off' position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe."

Why the strength of the Higgs field is so ridiculously weak defies understanding.

The second Problem is dark energy.

"We don't," Cliff admits, "know what dark energy is."

But that isn't the Problem. This is:

"Dark energy should be 10120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy," Cliff said. "This is a number so mind-bogglingly huge that it's impossible to get your head around. This number is bigger than any number in astronomy—it's a thousand-trillion-trillion-trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. That's a pretty bad prediction."

And so, concludes Cliff, "we may be entering a new era in physics. An era where there are weird features in the universe that we cannot explain. An era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly beyond our reach. An era where we will never be able to answer the question why is there something rather than nothing."

Martin Luther King, whose birthday last Friday it was, mentioned physics in the last speech he gave, on April 3, 1968, at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee.

The physics of Bull Conner & Co. Which was, as King explained, surmounted by the transphysics, of King and associates.

We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do. I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church, day after day; by the hundreds, we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs, singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around."

Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics, that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics, that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denominations, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled. But we knew water. That couldn't stop us.

And we just went on before the dogs, and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses, and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons. And sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take 'em off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon, singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.

So it's okay. The fear and trembling of the Science Men, for the end of their physics. Because already there exists transphysics.

Which is easily apprehended. As King also said in that speech, you just "go up to the mountain. And look over."

It's a very good speech. Worth a listen. In full. Some time.

But it really doesn't matter with me now.
Because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I've loooked over.
And so I'm happy tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man.

Transphysics.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixfwGLxRJU8]

The Kenyan, he and his people are meanwhile spinning their ur-wheels in primitive bomb physics.

This guy, he said he wanted "a nuclear-free world," and promised that during his administration the United States would create no new nuclear arms. But this vow has since morphed into sorta his version of The Clenis emission of "it depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

Because the Kenyan's bomb-boys, in "modernizing existing weapons [to] produce a smaller and more reliable arsenal," are careening down a mad path in which "the smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use—even to use first, rather than in retaliation."

The overall plan was to rearrange old components of nuclear arms into revitalized weapons. The resulting hybrids would be far more reliable, meaning the administration could argue that the nation would need fewer weapons in the far future.

Inside the administration, some early enthusiasts for Mr. Obama's vision began to worry that it was being turned on its head.

In late 2013, the first of the former insiders spoke out. Philip E. Coyle III and Steve Fetter, who had recently left national security posts, helped write an 80-page critique of the nuclear plan by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group that made its name during the Cold War, arguing for arms reductions.

The insider critiques soon focused on individual weapons, starting with the B61 Model 12. The administration’s plan was to merge four old B61 models into a single version that greatly reduced their range of destructive power. It would have a "dial-a-yield" feature whose lowest setting was only 2 percent as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The plan seemed reasonable, critics said, until attention fell on the bomb’s new tail section and steerable fins. The Federation of American Scientists, a Washington research group, argued that the high accuracy and low destructive settings meant military commanders might press to use the bomb in an attack, knowing the radioactive fallout and collateral damage would be limited.

Some of the biggest names in nuclear strategy see a specific danger in the next weapon in the modernization lineup: the new cruise missile, a "standoff weapon" that bombers can launch far from their targets.

They argued that the cruise missile might sway a future president to contemplate "limited nuclear war." Worse yet, they said, because the missile comes in nuclear and non-nuclear varieties, a foe under attack might assume the worst and overreact, initiating nuclear war.

"Dial-a-yield." "Limited nuclear war." These people have a bubbling brain malformation, and they need to be Treated in a Facility.

Don't "modernize" and "downsize." Just get rid of the goddam things.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU7_G2grxJE]

Because they too are unacquainted with transphysics, the folks in the Chongqing military command recently took to the pages of People's Liberation Army Daily to moan and weep that "our military modernisation level is not commensurate with the security needs of the world's largest developing country and the gap with the world's advanced militaries."

Their nutbar General Secretary has urged them to "focus on winning wars as their central task," to "concentrate on the study of military affairs, wars and how to fight battles, and strengthen their awareness in preparing for war at any time."

And so, the military frets, that "whether the armed forces bring glory or disgrace ultimately rests on the basis of the country's power and military's strength," and "once something happens and the armed forces cannot win, then they will be condemned through the ages."

No. That you even thought you needed a military, there in the 21st Century, it is for that, that you will be gently laughed at, and genuinely pitied, by the people of the future, and for ten thousand generations.

There is in this moment a flower blooming in space. It is a zinnia. Here it is:

I like this story. But it also reminds me of the true-life documentary film Silent Running. Set in the time when the humans have managed to get rid of all the nature on Earth. Everywhere on the planet the temperature is a constant 75 degrees; all the humans have a job, there is no poverty, and little disease. But all the plants and trees and non-human living creatures have been eradicated. What remain of these are enclosed in domes attached to spaceships orbiting out and around Saturn. Until the order comes to jettison and time-release nuclear-explode the domes, and return the spaceships to "commercial service."

Douglas Trumbull, fresh from overseeing the effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed Silent Running, and for a little under $1 million. No one could figure out how he managed to bring it in for so cheap. Except for those who understood he is a wizard.

Then, the film died an ignominious death at the box office. Because, as Trumbull put it, "I didn't know that I was part of an experiment by Universal Studios to see if it was possible to have a movie survive on word of mouth alone without an advertising campaign." And so Trumbull was sent into the wilderness, and did not direct another film for many, many years.

The Academy Award nominations for year 2015 were recently announced, and almost immediately thereafter began the ritual wailing and rending of garments over films and personages who had allegedly been "snubbed," "scorned," "passed over."

Yesterday, Jada Pinkett Smith and Spike Lee, they seriously upped the outrage ante, by taking to the tubes to thunder that they shall boycott the Oscar ceremonies, to protest the non-inculsion, among the nominees, of people with melanin.

Now, such people are certainly entitled to do what they want. But Lee, particularly, has to know that an awards-outfit, intended to bestow honors upon the peak practitioners of cinema, yet one that has never managed to shovel a directing Oscar to people like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Akira Kurosawa, Jane Campion, Sam Peckinpah, Federico Fellini, Gillian Armstrong, Peter Weir, Terrence Malick, or for that matter Lee himself, is one that can't possibly be taken, on any level, seriously.

Truth is, Oscars are almost always awarded based upon arcane, baroque, byzantine, maze-like, quantum-cubed, and/or frankly shiveringly embarrassing factors, that have little or nothing to do with the actual quality of the work.

When you've worked for it, and you've secured it, and you deserve it, and you don't get it, you just have to laugh with it.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IX-sP6QP4k]

Whatever it is, on this Earth, and no mattter how bad it is, that's how you get through.

In laughing.

Long as you can.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvylMnCe3k]

I'm sure Lee also recognizes that, particularly for performers, there are only two real inside-tracks to securing an Oscar.

The first is to be a comfy Hollywood vet, old, and old, and, therefore, probably dying.

As James Coburn observed, when he received the Best Supporting Actor award for his wisp of a role in Affliction, "this can't be for my role in that film. It has to be for my body of work."

The second—and even more sure-fire method, than the dying—is to play some sort of mutant. Someone gravely physically and/or mentally divergent.

Because Oscar voters, they simply cannot pass up, a good mutant performance.

Just off the top of my beer, I can think of: Fredric March (humble Science Man cum homicidal maniac, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Charlize Theron (raped prostitute cum serial killer, Monster), Ray Milland (tosspot DTs-spasming writer, The Lost Weekend), Nicole Kidman (mentally ill writer, The Hours), Kathy Bates (crazed fan who enslaves her favorite writer, Misery), Linda Hunt (female actress essaying male dwarf, The Year of Living Dangerously), Hilary Swank (raped and murdered trans man, Boys Don't Cry).

Of: Peter Finch (insane epileptic TV newsman, Network), Cliff Robertson (retarded man briefly rendered a genius by Science Men potion, then returned to retardation, Charly), Anthony Hopkins (face-eating freak, The Silence Of The Lambs), Broderick Crawford (psychotic Louisiana governor Huey Long, All The King's Men), Forest Whitaker (crazed African potentate Idi Amin, The Last King Of Scotland), Kate Winslet (suicided illiterate Jew-killer, The Reader), Robert De Niro (brutalist pregnant-wife-kicking animal, for which role De Niro "ate his way through Tuscany" for four months to put on 40 pounds for the film's final scenes, Raging Bull).

Of: Ingrid Bergman (woman driven to derangement by Bad Husband, Gaslight), Vivien Leigh (raped, mentally ill, fantasist, A Streetcar Named Desire), Elizabeth Taylor (drunken, abusive fantasist, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?), Ingrid Bergman (suicidal amnesiac herded into a plot to pretend she's a dead royal Russian girl, Anastasia), Josephine Hull (daft old woman who consorts with invisible time-traveling Celtic rabbit, Harvey), Patty Duke (deaf and blind girl, The Miracle Worker), Ruth Gordon (slavering servant of Satan, Rosemary's Baby).

Of: Angelina Jolie (officially diagnosed sociopath, entombed in a mental institution, Girl, Interrupted), Geoffrey Rush (mentally broken bath-shitting classical pianist, Shine), Holly Hunter (mute finger-mutilated pianist, The Piano), Joanne Woodward (screamingly insane woman with three separate personalites, The Three Faces Of Eve), Jack Nicholson (OCD-deranged writer, As Good As It Gets), Dustin Hoffman (autistic gibberer, Rain Man), Harold Russell (hands-less WWII vet, The Best Years Of Our Lives), Jon Voight (paraplegic Vietnam vet, Coming Home), Hilary Swank (euthanised quadriplegic, Million Dollar Baby).

Of: Daniel Day-Lewis (cerebral-palsy sufferer, My Left Foot), Eddie Remayne (neuron-blasted physicist Stephen Hawking, The Theory Of Everything), Lee Marvin (dual role as drunken gunslinger, and noseless gunslinger, Cat Ballou), John Wayne (obese alcoholic horse-crushing lawman, True Grit), Al Pacino (blind, lecherous, alcoholic, Scent Of A Woman), Nicolas Cage (suicidal alcoholic screenwriter, Leaving Las Vegas), Tom Hanks (opera-obsessed AIDS victim, Philadelphia), Julianne Moore (linguistics professor as Alzheimer's-sufferer, Still Alice), Tom Hanks (moron, imbecile, "a pitiful stooge taking the pie of life in the face, thoughtfully licking his fingers," Forrest Gump), Colin Firth (spluttering stutterer who would be king, The King's Speech), George C. Scott (mass-murdering psychopath, Patton).

The message, it is clear, Spike. Write into your films, mutants. Ones that will be like Forrest Gump sugar, like Misery honey, to white people.

Or, not.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvViRsQYGfw]

Spike. I know that you know. That the true transphysical films. Are never really seen. Until years after. If, even, then.

a lot of flowers in this world
are never seen

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=878b3kF6d1U]

Back in September I featured some bits from "Overheard In LA," the LAist feature that purports to record what Angelinos have overheard other Angelinos saying.

Probably time for another installment. Some of these will make it easier to understand why Oscar voters (almost all such people live in and around Los Angeles) vote the way that they do.

—"This is Hollywood. You're going to see some things that confuse you."

—"Wait! We need to cut! The porcupine dropped its biscuit!"

—"It's like 50 First Dates but not romantic."

—"Carol is like The Martian but with lesbians but in New York in the '50s."

—"I saw The Big Short. Y'know, Ryan Gosling. Sometimes he has a beard and sometimes he doesn't. It really changes his appearance."

—"There, now you look like a Sith Lord."

—"He told me that I was the John Travolta of head shots."

—"I was reading your script and noticed there weren't any men in it. I really think you need a male lead character."

—"My dad won't buy me any more minks because the last one got covered in paint."

—"I'm almost financially independent except for my Equinox membership and cell-phone bill."

—"I spent all my birth-control money on Powerball tickets."

—"Siri, show me images of tiny black kittens with silvery eyes."

—"I hate having to shave my balls for work."

—"I have to pee, but that means I'd need to take my chaps off."

—"So my vagina treatment came in the mail today."

—"I lost so much weight after my nose job."

—"Atticus, put on your shoes! We're going for scones."

—"I don't hate brunch. I hate the brunch community."

—"Is the sauce on your chicken wings vegan?"

—"Does the hummus have MSG?"

—"I've bonded with so many people by splitting nachos."

—"Are you educated on the kind of weed you want to smoke today?"

—"It doesn't make you high. It just lets you communicate with the spirit world."

—"So how would you Yelp-review the acid?"

—"I'm getting a tattoo that reads 'Helvetica', but written in Arial.' When a woman corrects me on it, I will ask her to marry me."

—"I like him as a penis, but not as a man."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NFDgl8TnUE]

I tried to watch the most recent Democratic debate, whatever night that was that it was on, but I had to give it up. Because I couldn't take gazing on the hideous and pronounced moon facies of The Mad Bomber. Her face, it kept getting rounder and rounder—like somebody had pumped her full of mass quantities of steroids, shortly before she went on. Every time the camera panned back to her visage, it seemed that in the interval her face had grown rounder still. And bigger. She was swelling up like a balloon. I was afraid her head would pop, or float right off her shoulders. And I just wasn't prepared for either of these spectacles.

Meanwhile, the Cranky Brooklyn Deli Man, he was reminding me too much of a more presentable version of the addle-pated building-shouter who hangs out down by the ATM machine, the one we call "Old Yeller." And The Invisible Man, his ears, they were driving me mad. They are not actually inhuman, as were the ears of former presidential candidate Paul Simon, but there is still something deeply wrong with them. He needs to grow his hair out, so we don't have to look at them.

So I laid down, and in that way I didn't have to see any of these people, but could just listen to them, instead. And, recumbent, I recalled something Rude, that George Orwell had written, back in the 1940s, whilst gazing upon photographs of those most recently entered into the orders of British chivalry.

Looking through the photographs in the New Year's Honours List, I am struck (as usual) by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax-collector with a duodenal ulcer. But our country is not alone in this. Anyone who is a good hand with scissors and paste could compile an excellent book entitled Our Rulers, and consisting simply of published photographs of the great ones of the earth. The idea first occurred to me when I saw in Picture Post some "stills" of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.

When you had got together your collection of fuehrers, actual and would-be, you would notice that several qualities recur throughout the list. To begin with, they are all old. In spite of the lip-service that is paid everywhere to youth, there is no such thing as a person in a truly commanding position who is less than fifty years old. Secondly, they are nearly all undersized. A dictator taller than five feet six inches is a very great rarity. And, thirdly, there is this almost general and sometimes quite fantastic ugliness. The collection would contain photographs of Streicher bursting a blood vessel, Japanese war-lords impersonating baboons, Mussolini with his scrubby dewlap, the chinless de Gaulle, the stumpy short-armed Churchill, Gandhi with his long sly nose and huge bat's ears, Tojo displaying thirty-two teeth with gold in every one of them. And opposite each, to make a contrast, there would be a photograph of an ordinary human being from the country concerned. Opposite Hitler a young sailor from a German submarine, opposite Tojo a Japanese peasaint of the old type—and so on.

It's hard to stop quoting Orwell, when once you start. So I won't. Yet.

& I'll close with a thing Orwell wrote in his "As I Please" column for Tribune, 72 years ago this Thursday.

A correspondent reproaches me with being "negative" and "always attacking things." The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines—they have to be retrospective, unfortunately—in praise of the Woolworth's Rose.

In the good old days when nothing in Woolworth's cost over sixpence, one of their best lines was their rose bushes. They were always very young plants, but they came into bloom in their second year, and I don't think I ever had one die on me. Their chief interest was that they were never, or very seldom, what they claimed to be on their labels. One that I bought for a Dorothy Perkins turned out to be a beautiful little white rose with a yellow heart, one of the finest ramblers I have ever seen. A polyantha rose labelled yellow turned out to be deep red. Another, bought for an Albertine, was like an Albertine, but more double, and gave astonishing masses of blossom. These roses had all the interest of a surprise packet, and there was always the chance that you might happen upon a new variety which you should have the right to name John Smithii or something of that kind.

Last summer I passed the cottage where I used to live before the war. The little white rose, no bigger than a boy's catapult when I put it in, had grown into a huge vigorous bush, the Albertine or near-Albertine was smothering half the fence in a cloud of pink blossom. I had planted both of those in 1936. And I thought, "All that for sixpence!" I do not know how long a rose bush lives; I suppose ten years might be an average life. And throughout that time a rambler will be in full bloom for a month or six weeks each year, while a bush rose will be blooming, on and off, for at least four months. All that for sixpence—the price, before the war, of ten Players, or a pint and a half of mild, or a week's subscription to the Daily Mail, or about twenty minutes of twice-breathed air in the movies!

I think Orwell thought the "average life" of a rose to be ten years or so because he lived such an abbreviated life. And because he moved around a bit much.

Around the former place where I lived were "pioneer roses," planted by the women, who latterly accompanied the gold- and diamond-mad men, who streamed in desperation, to what is now, these days, a ghost town.

And, more than 100 years on, those roses are still thriving.

Which is something of a mystery.

Because, as anyone who has ever tried to grow roses around deer knows, deer will brutally chew a rose right down to the ground. And there were, and are, plenty of deer round those parts. But those roses, when I knew them, were unprotected. From deer, or anyone else. And yet they Lived.

And, in growing my own roses, in that realm, I noticed that, after 10 years or so, the roses developed some sort of peculiar protective power. So that the deer could no longer so ravage them.

And so, too, where I live now, I have an old climber rose, so old I can't identify it, and it is right out in the open, where the deer-lips are not all debarred, in any way, from feeding upon it. But, every year, I watch the deer give it but a nibble, and then pass on.

Roses are, in truth, immortal. Somewhere down there in the basement is a book that speaks of a rose in Germany that is more than 800 years old. It survived all the nonsense that humans in those centuries inflicted upon one another, and any and all other living creatures within range. Including, at the last, the WWII fire-bombing of near all that nation. It was burnt, then, that rose. And badly. But it is still Here. And growing.

I never prune my roses. They don't want it.

And when, in a wind, a branch is blown off, I take it and I plant it into the earth. And near half the time, that stick, it blossoms, in time, into a new rose. And, as per Orwell, when the new rose blooms, you never know, just what rose, you might get.

Which is like magic.

Because it is magic.

Because the rose. It is transphysical.

As are, all and all and all and all, all of we.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdtAfUtOEWA]