While not very religious in a traditional sense myself, i’ve been around enough quite religious folks to be quite sensitive to this issue, and that the sledgehammer approach of Dawkins et. al. is actually probably counterproductive to the cause of science in such a still heavily religiously fundamentalist country as the US is (despite some promising recent statistics, pointed out here at CV i believe within the last couple of weeks).

I was quite excited to see the results, because I had listened to the story of BLAST just a few months ago. Mark Devlin was here at IUCAA-Pune and gave 2 fantastic lectures on BLAST and ACT. He had talked in detail about the last flight of BLAST and the pains in recovering the hard-drives in white-painted casings in the white Antarctic snow from a flying chopper! So really, it was very exciting to see the papers. I realy wish to see the movie though. Wonder if they would screen it in India.. or maybe a dvd?

I also met Faye twice, once at an APS meeting in DC in the early 90’s and then later at one of the big conferences in our field in Vancouver. I remember vividly, her rapt attention at my attempt to explain quantum mechanics and particle physics to her, and her encouragement to try to write about it, which I do now, after a fashion, in this blog. Her articles are always entertaining and interesting, and her interest in physics and the people who do it shine through.