Presuming that you’re an American reading this, the odds are fairly strong that you heard this juicy tidbit in the internet/sports rumor mill today. The story is about a woman who is adored for her ability to play pretend, who filed for divorce from her husband, who is adored for his ability to throw a sphere into a standardized hoop.

Unless you are a facebook friend of mine, or happen to follow CERN’s twitter stream, you almost certainly weren’t appraised of this story today. That one told of the most complicated device ever constructed by your species, spawned something that, until fairly recently, was thought to be a purely theoretical type of stuff and sustained it for longer than it had ever been sustained.

I would love to say it was a good day for the human race. I’m not so sure.

The story that mattered today, by the way, was about the creation and sustenance of a particle of anti-matter. This type of negative matter is so difficult to see and/or create, because it literally annihilates normal matter when the two come into contact. And it was only by virtue of the most powerful magnetic array on the planet that the CERN scientists were able to stabilize one atom of anti-hydrogen for about a tenth of a second. Perhaps a standard news-soundbyte is still a bit long to discuss something that occurred so briefly.

It probably didn’t help the story’s stateside success, that America didn’t accomplish this feat. Certainly Americans were present, but credit goes to an internationally assembled team of scientists that run the Large Hadron Collider 100 meters below Geneva, Switzerland. It is unlikely that Americans would be able to fund and build such a facility in the first place, given our relative awkwardness is doing things below ground.

I’m going to save my ‘humanity is an ignorant, obese, and doomed species’ rant for another day. I just want you to think, for a moment, about the priorities of a culture that readily disseminates information about celebrity marital infidelity, and goes out of its way to avoid even mentioning a once-in-a-generation scientific achievement. Does this sound like a healthy culture to you? Does this sound like a culture that fearlessly bounds into the future ready to evolve and adapt and meet challenges on a planetary scale? Or does it sound like a culture that is so addicted to sensation that it dollops scoops of scandal onto an already overfilled plate of materialism, demagoguery, and myth?

If our attention is constantly focused on the wrong things, then, culturally, we’re learning the wrong things. And if we’re learning the wrong things, we’re not getting smarter. And if we’re not getting smarter, we’re probably not evolving particularly well. And if we’re not evolving, I’m not sure what it is we think we’re doing with our existence – other than squandering it.

Article first published as Matter vs Anti-Matter on Technorati.

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