Readingthe recent article in the NYT about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a crafty $1.6 billion dollar Swiss clock which in addition to telling the time, also reads dark matter from cosmic rays, I'm struck with regret that I never paid attention in math class.
What sucks about being a liberal arts major is that scientists often invent things that promise to solve your lifelong search for meaning, but whose utility, function, and purpose sends you running to the bathroom for aspirin.
I can think of two specific examples. The first is the Large Hadron Collider, a device whose operation is so abstruse for the laymen, I couldn't even understand its function when Hollywood digitally spelled it out for me in Angels and Demons.
The second is The Super Kamiokande
From the moment I laid eyes on it, I couldn't help but want one for myself. A 3,200-foot deep cavern of photo-multiplier jellyfish bots surrounded by ultra-purified water and two little guys in orange jumpsuits rafting around. Why do I love it? Perhaps because the name and image alone conjures up the Crash Man stage in Mega Man 2.It's cute and eerie in the way that so many Japanese things are cute and eerie. But what, oh, what, does it do? Let's check their website

We have discovered neutrino oscillations by SK which was started its data taking in 1996. This discovery has revealed that neutrinos have finite masses, which was previously considered to be massless, --a clue to a new theoretical frame-work of the elementally particle physics. K2K experiment has confirmed the neutrino oscillation by using the man-made neutrinos.

Well, it doesn't help that the entire website is in Engrish, but I just don't understand what the hell any of this means or why it has to be so deep underground to discover why neutrinos have masses. Why is it important? What's the value of finding this information? And inevitably I always stumble across that spooky and confounding term one finds in every science article.

The 23% of them is found to be a dark matter which does not emit light, but can be observed by gravity. The dark matter is expected to be a new elementary particle. The direct observation of the dark matter will be a great help to understand the structure of the universe.

"Dark Matter." I feel it's important to understand dark matter, to grok this concept so as to understand what the hell is going on and why I'm sitting here, me, this self incarnate in a body. But then I realize that to understand dark matter, I would first have to understand matter, by which I would have to first understand atoms, which might actually require me to do some math which calls to mind Mark McConkey stabbing himself with a protractor in 9th grade and textbooks which had covers that looked like this, but insides that looked like this and I just can't go back there.