Educators from Australia

"It is my belief that we have two responsibilities to pursue: Primarily, it is to get our house and garden, our place of living, in order, so that it supports us; Secondarily, it is to limit our population on earth, or we ourselves become the final plague. Both these duties are intimately connected, as stable regions create stable populations. If we do not get our cities, homes, and gardens in order, so that they feed and shelter us, we must lay waste to all other natural systems. Thus, truly responsible conservationists have gardens…"

"…the end result of the adoption of permaculture strategies in any country or region will be to dramatically reduce the area of the agricultural environment needed by the households and the settlements of people, and to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora."

"You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes."

"I confess to a rare problem—gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me—but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves. It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day."

"Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion; it is the acid test of entropic order to test the system for yield. If it consumes energy beyond product, it is in disoder. If it produces energy to or beyond consumption, it is ordered."

"What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness."

"Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order."

"For priority in location, we need to first attend to Zone 1 and Zone 2; these support the household and save the most expense. What is perhaps of greatest importance, and cannot be too highly stressed, is the need to develop very compact systems. … We can all make a very good four meters square garden, where we may fail to do so in 40 square meters."

"Most biologists," (says , 1981) "seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region."

"Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use or value them creatively."

"We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently …"

"As we read this, we stand in the plane of the present; we are the sum of all our ancestors, and the origin of all our descendents. In terms of our model, we are at an ever-changing origin, located on the boundary of past and future. As well, we are spinning with the earth, spiralling with the galaxy, and expanding or contracting with the universe. As origins, we are on the move in time and space, and all these movements have a characteristic pulse rate."

"A bird's-eye view of centralised and disempowered societies will reveal a strictly rectilinear network of streets, farms, and property boundaries. It is as though we have patterned the earth to suit our survey instruments rather than to serve human or environmental needs. We cannot perhaps blame Euclid for this, but we can blame his followers. The straight-line patterns that result prevent most sensible landscape planning strategies and result in neither an aesthetically nor functionally satisfactory landscape or stretscape. Once established, then entered into a body of law, such inane (or insane) patterning is stubbornly defended. But it is created by, and can be dismantled by, people."

"… the value of land must, in the future, be assessed on its yield of potable water. Those property-owners with a constant source of pure water already have an economically-valuable "product" from their land, and need look no further for a source of income."

"Of all the elements of critical importance to plants, phosophorus is the least commonly found, and sources are rarely available locally. Of all the phosphatic fertilisers used, Europe and North America consume 75% (and get least return from this input because of overuse, over-irrigation, and poor soil economy). If we really wanted to reduce world famine, the redirection of these surplus phosphates to the poor soils of Africa and India (or any other food-deficient area) would do it. Forget about miracle plants; we need global ethics for all such essential soil resources. As long as we clear-cultivate, most of this essential and rare resource will end up in the sea."

"It seems curious that we know so much about sheep, so little about those animals which outweigh them per hectare by factors of ten or a hundred times, and that we do not investigate these matters far more seriously. Our most sustainable yields may be grubs or caterpillars rather than sheep; we can convert these invertebrates to use by feeding them to poultry or fish. We can't go wrong in encouraging a complex of life in soils, from roots and mycorrhiza to moles and earthworms, and in thinking of ways in which soil life assists us to produce crop, it itself becomes a crop."

"As non-scientists, most gardeners deprived of atomic-ray spectrometers, a battery of reagents, and a few million research dollars must look to signs of health such as the birds, reptiles, worms, and plants of their garden-farm. For myself, in a truly natural garden I have come to expect to see, hear, and find evidence of abundant vertebrate life. This, and this alone, assures me that invertebrates still thrive there. I know of many farms where neither birds nor worms exist, and I suspect that their products are dangerous to all life forms."

"Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance."

"Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp."

"It is possible, in Iran, Greece, North Africa, USA, Mexico, Pakistan, and Australia to see how, in our short history of life destruction, we have brought the hard bones of the earth to the surface by stripping the life skin from it for ephemeral uses. We can, if we persist, create a moon-landscape of the earth. So poor goatherds wander where the lake-forests stood and the forest deities were worshipped. The religions of resignation and fanaticism follow those of the nature gods, and man-built temples replace trees and tree spirits."

"Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails."

"A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes..."

"Peat preserves timber, animals, and such unexpected treasure-troves as hoards of acorns and firkins of beech butter from the forests which preceded the bogs. A whole archaeology may very well lie in peat, and the pollen record may reveal past history. At the base of Irish bogs the ' (the little people), their axes, bridges, butter, and forest life are well preserved. They and their forests were banished, as if by magic, by the ' (the Children of Diana) who now dig the peat. Diana was displaced in turn by Mary, mother of God. But all are mixed in the peat and the tongue of Ireland."

"Steps in total planning are roughly in priority:"

"Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals."

"Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions. Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way."

"In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself."

"A people without an agreed-upon common basis to their actions is neither a community nor a nation. A people with a common ethic is a nation wherever they live. Thus, the place of habitation is secondary to a shared belief in the establishment of an harmonious world community. Just as we can select a global range of plants for a garden, we can select from all extant ethics and beliefs those elements that we see to be sustainable, useful, and beneficial to life and to our community."

"Security can be found in renunciation of ownership over people, money, and real assets; to gain, keep or protect that which others need for periods of legitimate access. A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it."

"If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere."

"In any group endeavour, there are practical and effective, or impractical and ineffective, ways to manage a complex system. Impractical, frustrating, and time-consuming systems are those governed by large boards, assemblies, or groups (seven or more people). These "meetings" have a chairperson, agendas, proposals, votes, or use consensus, and can go on for hours. Consensus, in particular, is an endless and pointless affair, with coercion of the often silent or incoherent abstainer by a vociferous minority. Thus, decisions reached by boards, parliaments, and consensus groups either oppress some individuals (votes) or are vetoed by dissenters. In either case, we have tyranny of a majority or tyranny of a minority, and a great deal of frustration and wasted time. The way to abolish such systems is to have one meeting where the sole agenda is to vote to abolish decision meetings -- this is usually carried unanimously -- and another where a consensus is reached to abolish consensus -- this too shouldn't take long."

"There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not."

"It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession."

"I am a utilitarian. I am also a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian because I am a utilitarian."

"To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed... It's had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly been minor. When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been."

"The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all. If, however, we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the god who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler."

"Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings."

"Philosophy is not politics, and we do our best, within our all-too-human limitations, to seek the truth, not to score points against opponents. There is little satisfaction in gaining an easy triumph over a weak opponent while ignoring better arguments against your views."

"I never believed in a God. [...] There may have been times when I wondered if there might be a God, but it always seemed to me wildly implausible that a God worth worshipping could allow the Holocaust to occur."

"if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it."

"neither our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil."

"People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory" - an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so."

"Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too."

"Speciesism—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species."

"Let us consider first the view that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life. We may call this the “sanctity of life” view. People who take this view oppose abortion and euthanasia. They do not usually, however, oppose the killing of nonhuman animals—so perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this view as the “sanctity of human life” view. The belief that human life, and only human life, is sacrosanct is a form of speciesism."

"[One thing] underpins, makes consistent, and gives meaning to all our other activities on behalf of animals. This one thing is that we take responsibility for our own lives, and make them as free of cruelty as we can. The first step is that we cease to eat animals. Many people who are opposed to cruelty to animals draw the line at becoming a vegetarian. It was of such people that Oliver Goldsmith, the eighteenth-century humanitarian essayist, wrote: "They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion.""

"Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering upon them."

"To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks."

"How far down the evolutionary scale shall we go? Shall we eat fish? What about shrimps? Oysters? To answer these questions we must bear in mind the central principle on which our concern for other beings is based. As I said … the only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account."

"Those who claim to care about the wellbeing of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, population control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent. … when nonvegetarians say that “human problems come first” I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals."

"The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or boycotts. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that morality counts for nothing when it clashes with selfinterest, as the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it."

"It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason."

"Ethics is inescapable."

"Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human."

"If evolution is a struggle for survival, why hasn't it ruthlessly eliminated altruists, who seem to increase another's prospects of survival at the cost of their own?"

"The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors."

"Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute."

"Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements."

"The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go."

"Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end."

"There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine."

"The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains."

"Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating."

"The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings."

"The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone's advantage."

"Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt."

"Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate-change, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture."

"Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles."

"We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented."

"When my ability to reason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true. ... The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found."

"My students often ask me if I think their parents did wrong to pay the $44,000 per year that it costs to send them to Princeton. I respond that paying that much for a place at an elite university is not justified unless it is seen as an investment in the future that will benefit not only one’s child, but others as well. An outstanding education provides students with the skills, qualifications, and understanding to do more for the world than would otherwise be the case. It is good for the world as a whole if there are more people with these qualities. Even if going to Princeton does no more than open doors to jobs with higher salaries, that, too, is a benefit that can be spread to others, as long as after graduating you remain firm in the resolve to contribute a percentage of that salary to organizations working for the poor, and spread this idea among your highly paid colleagues. The danger, of course, is that your colleagues will instead persuade you that you can’t possibly drive anything less expensive than a BMW and that you absolutely must live in an impressively large apartment in one of the most expensive parts of town."

"when we make ethical judgments, we must go beyond a personal or sectional point of view and take into account the interests of all those affected, unless we have sound ethical grounds for doing otherwise. (...) The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions. (...) an interest is an interest, whoever's interest it may be."

"It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values that we hold."

"Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can."

"We do not have to make self- sacrifice a necessary element of altruism. We can regard people as altruists because of the kind of interests they have rather than because they are sacrificing their interests."

"Remember Bostrom’s definition of existential risk, which refers to the annihilation not of human beings, but of “Earth-originating intelligent life.” The replacement of our species by some other form of conscious intelligent life is not in itself, impartially considered, catastrophic. Even if the intelligent machines kill all existing humans, that would be...a very small part of the loss of value that Parfit and Bostrom believe would be brought about by the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life. The risk posed by the development of AI, therefore, is not so much whether it is friendly to us, but whether it is friendly to the idea of promoting wellbeing in general, for all sentient beings it encounters, itself included."

"One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today’s factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy."

"September 11, 2001, was just another day for most of the world’s desperately poor people, so presumably close to 30,000 children under five died from these causes on that day—about ten times the number of victims of the terrorist attacks. The publication of these figures did not lead to an avalanche of money for UNICEF or other aid agencies helping to reduce infant mortality. In the year 2000 Americans made private donations for foreign aid of all kinds totaling about $4 per person in extreme poverty, or roughly $20 per family. New Yorkers who were living in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, whether wealthy or not, were able to receive an average of $5,300 per family. The distance between these amounts encapsulates the way in which, for many people, the circle of concern for others stops at the boundaries of their own country—if it extends even that far."

"Animals no doubt have different interests from humans, and may experience different pleasures and pains, but the principle of equal consideration for similar interests still holds, and pleasures and pains of similar intensity and duration should be given equal weight, whether they are experienced by humans or by animals."

"the fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong."

"The kind of equality utilitarianism supports is given by Bentham’s formula...: ‘everybody to count for one, and nobody for more than one’...Utilitarianism seeks to maximize happiness, and in deciding how to calculate whether happiness is being maximized, no one’s pleasures or pains should count for less because they are peasants rather than aristocrats, slaves rather than slave-owners, Africans rather than Europeans, poor rather than rich, illiterates rather than doctors of philosophy, children rather than adults, females rather than males, or even, as we have seen, non-human animals rather than human beings."

"I regard Peter as one of the great moralists, because I suspect that more than anyone he has helped to change the attitudes of very many people to the sufferings of animals. Peter is a utilitarian in normative ethics, and a humane attitude to animals is a natural corollary of utilitarianism. Utilitarian concern for animals goes back to Bentham, who, presumably alluding to the Kantians, said that the question was not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer."

"Some of Singer's critics call him a Nazi and compare his proposals to Hitler's schemes for eliminating the unwanted, the unfit and the disabled. But...Singer is no Hitler. He doesn't want state-sponsored killings. Rather, he wants the decision to kill to be made by you and me. Instead of government-conducted genocide, Singer favors free-market homicide."

"At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional...Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer...This idea popularized by Professor Singer — that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species — is one whose time appears to have come...What we’re seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others...animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda."

"Inaugurated in 1975 by Peter Singer“s famous pamphlet, ”'Animal Liberation“”, philosophical research into our duties towards animals, the moral rights to be ascribed to them, how it is right to treat them, and which practices — economic, scientific, technological—are consistent with the principles of a normative ethic that includes among its “clients” the grandchildren of Bentham and Kant as much as those of Fido or Pluto, is now vast. (p. 7)"

"We all tend to be greedy end-gainers, paying no attention to our means whereby."

"Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, Merry merry king of the bush is he. Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra, Gay your life must be!"

"Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype—the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy."

"[Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations."

"The egoist … destroys the universal importance accorded to moral law by showing that life independent of it is possible. Secondly, and even more intolerably to the pious, he manages to do so with shameless enjoyment."

"In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck."

"The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress."

"Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’."

"By punishing the criminal the moral man hopes to dissuade the evil imprisoned in his own breast from escaping. Fear of self is projected in hatred of the immoral other."

"The real task is not to rid life of ethics but to rid ethics of its ideological content."

"Stirner and Nietzsche … reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue."

"Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check."

"There is a strong strain of Protestant masochism in this [Nietzsche’s] assault on morality and ideology. … Framing this perspective is the Protest image of the utterly self-reliant, responsible individual."

"The ‘I think, therefore I am’ of Descartes, the ‘I feel, therefore I am’ of late eighteenth century Romanticism, and the ‘I possess therefore I am’ of bourgeois man are dogmas, partial at that, incorporated to define a being that is incapable of defining itself."

"The act of greatest subversion … is the one of indifference. A man, or a group, finds it unbearable that someone can be simply uninterested in his, or its, convictions. … There is a degree of complicity, or mutual respect, between the believer and the man who attacks his beliefs (the revolutionary), for the latter takes them seriously."

"The enemies of Christ … could not bear his independence; his “Give the emperor that which is the emperor’s” showed a contempt for the affairs of state and its politics—for the moral order—that their self-respect would not let them tolerate."

"Politics and the affairs of State are dissociated from the orbit of the individual, and in so far as they cannot be repossessed as his living private property they must be rendered impotent."

"For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual’s interests."

"… the bourgeois, who is not a real owner, but the servant of his avarice"

"The estranged ego projects its own disorder on to society and expects the restructuring and integration of the self writ large, the society, to reflect back on to the source of consciousness. Stirner regards this flight from self as a form of suicide, the dissolution of identity and uniqueness."

"Whereas Marx’s vision of homo faber becomes inoperative within social chains, Stirner’s man makes his own freedom."

"There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual’s responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism."

"The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions."

"The original of morals lies with the thought that ‘the community is more valuable than the individual’ (Menschliches 2.1.89)"

"Stirner’s political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. … Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual’s action. … The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act."

"Nietzsche … explicates his preferred distinction between good and bad individuals as non-condemnatory of the latter. A ‘bad person’ is merely devoid of what Nietzsche personally considers to be noble or virtuous qualities; he is not morally evil. Nietzsche’s aim is … to defuse morality of reactive emotion. … It would be futile, tactless, and cruel, he suggests, to try to change a bad person, one with whom one does not empathize; his formula advises: ‘Where you cannot love, pass by’. No on should be blamed for what he is; there is no point in lamenting fate."

"Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful."

"The ugliness of the ideological lies in its legitimating the pursuit of the trivial."

"The garden [of Eden] is the realm of pure beauty from which man is expelled when he becomes interested in ethics, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The return into paradise, the homecoming, depends on him penetrating the veils of morality to glimpse again the lineaments of lost beauty."

"Nietzsche … argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe … who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil."

"Nietzsche … criticizes Schopenhauerian aesthetics for not freeing itself from Kant’s moralistic: ‘that is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest’."

"The priest who has lost the resilience of youth cannot be helped; his polymorphously playful and imaginative energies have been emasculated by a long conditioning to the ways of the old order; he would be liberated into a sea of undifferentiated boredom and anxiety. Only the man whose desires and passions are intact has a future."

"The schizophrenic is seen to be afraid of the nihilistic void that … will remain when a rigid world-view is discarded."

"Any attempt to break with the past, or with existing social structures, is a failure if it leads to a bored, listless, and colourless style of life; assertive and enduring innovation, like the mastering of a new environment, requires the confidence and discipline which are founded on exuberant emotions."

"Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the ‘last man’—he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension."

"Copernicus and Darwin undermined man’s image of himself as the ‘measure of all things’. Newton provided him with a new hope … that of ‘man as the measurer of all things’. Thus the possibility was revealed to man, who had been disinherited from being at the center of the universe, that he might be able know how to work himself back there. Science, at the same time it destroyed his ontological security, gave him the tools for reapproaching Eden."

"Nietzsche … combines, in effect, Christ’s harsh sayings: ‘let the dead bury their dead’ and ‘narrow is the way which leadeth unto life’."

"The possibility of a genuine metatheory of morality is not available. Even psychology has its ethical presuppositions. … A metatheory of morality would be legitimate only if the existence of a hierarchy of absolute, and hence unconditioned, truths were established. They would then provide a framework of supra-ethical categories. The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is to expose just such an exercise … as sleight of hand, an efficacious deception. This critique sets out to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments"

"The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is … to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments."

"Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel. Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking."

"Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a ‘ruling thought’. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, … for language itself is a network of ‘fixed ideas’. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually."

"If man is to remain the creator and master of his world then, Stirner maintains, … all that has been accepted, that has taken on the secure guise of the ‘fact’, must be return to a state of flux, or be rejected."

"This will of Stirner’s, this restless probing of all given knowledge, this endless questioning, and the continuous bending towards new understanding, …"

"R. W. K. Paterson makes a central point of identifying Stirner with nihilism. His argument depends on a failure to distinguish between social values, which Stirner does reject, and personal values, to which he is more overtly committed than any other philosopher."

"Nietzsche [claims] that the scientist is at best an instrument, a useful slave: he does not command or decide, he is not a whole man."

"Stirner … holds to a joy-principle rather than to a pleasure-principle."

"Unless the fundamental categories of economics such as ‘property’ were to be redefined in a radically personal way the liberal rationalist curse which had established economics as a scientific discipline cut off from human interests would proliferate. Economic models … have failed to incorporate any meaningful index of individual benefit other than the original utilitarian one, … the index of increasing income or an increasing flow of commodities."

"Dostoevsky’s underground man … observes his contemporaries striving to establish false goals where there are no naturally generated ones. … He argues they should be conscious and honest enough to recognize that the goal itself is not an absolute, and probably not even important. A strong attachment to the telos indicates that the spontaneous enjoyment the child once took in road-building has waned."

"A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play."

"Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative—the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom."

"Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. … The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae."

"Modern anthropology … opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means."

"For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires."

"Man at his best is a system-breaker, an iconoclast seeking not only variety, but destruction."

"The Inquisitor is the forgiving father, the scientific materialist, and the social engineer. He is the most compassionate, and honest, of politicians; he takes on great burdens of responsibility in order to protect his subjects from ethical doubt. But he also suppresses any attempt to expand their self-consciousness: he is the ‘great simplifier’, the shepherd to a flock of carefree children."

"Dostoevsky … impeaches Christ through the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor: ‘it was pitiless of thee to value man so highly’. This Christ has no answer to the world of politics, of rational action, of knowledge. He is utterly Nietzschean in his intention not to pity, but to respect."

"The dialectical critique of positivist habits of mind … is interested only in behaviour which is ‘important’ to the actor; that is, behaviour which is emotionally charged to the degree that it is either frequently recalled, reflected upon, or day-dreamed about. … That science which is less discriminating in the behaviour it chooses to investigate gains clarity and distinctiveness at the cost of confining itself to the trivial."

"Unlike Hegel’s progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically."

"Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal—the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. … Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own."

"What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche’s late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist, to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety."

"Prison officers do not have a 'duty of care' to protect prisoners who harm themselves while taking part in illegal behaviour. With regard to needles in prisons, provision of bleach could also be harmful. Bleach is by nature a corrosive agent and could cause serious injury if thrown into the eyes of a prison officer or fellow prisoner, There is evidence that even the highly caustic phenol used to sterilise dental instruments does not eliminate all HIV viruses - only autoclaving in super-heated steam is fully effective. If government provided bleach fails to sterilise prisoners’ illegal needles adequately, does the government become liable for breach of duty of care?"

"Injecting illegal drugs is NOT OK! Prison must be a place where prisoners can detoxify and have the chance to break the habit. This avenue should be addressed, rather than options which reinforce the addictive behaviour."

"South Australian prison officers do have a duty of care to protect inmates from rape and from assault. Provision of condoms would not protect against rape: prisoners with rape or assault tendencies should be separated from other prisoners. So should prisoners with HIV/AIDS."

"Provision of condoms also sends the message that sex between prisoners is OK - yet abstinence is part and parcel of a prison sentence."

"Two of the House of Assembly members, Mr Scalzi and Mr Leggett, basically said that efforts should be made to stamp out drug use, sex and rape in prisons. I think we might as well try to make efforts to try to stop the sun rising, because the evidence we received showed that—it does not matter where you want to go—no other country in the world has been able to stop drug use in prison. If you cannot stop drug use, I doubt very much that you will be able to stop sexual practices, given that the sex drive is probably a little bit stronger than the desire to use drugs."

"…I’m very rich because I’m loved by all my people, it’s a very beautiful thing. No money could surpass that. The love that my people feel for me is just so tremendous. It’s a lovely feeling."

"…I can’t afford the luxury of despair or pessimism. We still have to hope. We’re a timeless people, we’ve lived in a timeless land. We have suffered the invasion of two hundred years, and we’ll go on suffering. But we are going to survive…"

"…In the Aboriginal world we give way to all emotions. In the ‘British’, the present white generation of Australian people have been told that to cry is weakness, and if a ten year old boy gets up and cries they say, My goodness! But in the Aboriginal world, to cry is a beautiful thing. To us it’s compassion…"

"…in the early stages, the whites were kept very effectively away from the Aborigines. And whites will tell you quite blankly, I’ve never met an Aborigine in my life, so how could they know about us, how could they feel for us? It was done deliberately. They didn’t want friends of the Aborigines coming out and upsetting the jolly old white Australian apple cart you know, rocking the boat."

"There are around 35,000 sanitation workers in Mumbai. Of these, some 28,000 are and 7,000 are hired on contract. Permanent sanitation workers have their basic working conditions protected by law. They are provided with uniforms, payment slips, medical insurance, and paid leave. Contract workers have none of these benefits. As migrants, they do not have ration cards or permanent housing either. Most of them live in unauthorised shanties that are frequently demolished, which forces them to periodically search for a new spot to build their homes again. It is not uncommon for the work of permanent employees to also be subdivided among contract workers. After years of persistent ground-level organising, the movement has come closer to the abolition of the system of subcontracting, which has made sanitation work one of the most dangerous, precarious, and dehumanising jobs in India today."

"All of the contract workers employed by the are Dalits, who are migrants. [...] Several sanitation workers [...] are forced to leave their homes in rural areas in search of work because of drought conditions, which are becoming worse each year. The two main areas they come from are in Maharashtra, and Salem and in Tamil Nadu. They are often landless, or unable to make a living from the small plots of land they own. [...] The wages for contract workers are barely enough to survive on, and many of them are malnourished. They collect garbage with their bare hands, without hand gloves, facemasks, shoes, or a uniform. There are no facilities at the work stations for employees to wash their bodies. [...] The workers suffer from various illnesses because of the poor working conditions and often die at a young age. Tuberculosis and other lung diseases are common due to the kinds of gases they are exposed to and the conditions they work in. There are frequent accidents."

"'[The media] promoted hoaxes that Hamas beheaded babies and carried out mass rape, in order to shore up support for Israel, and distorting events.'"

"In terms of , the worst thing you can do is have a child. And it’s the one taboo that nobody wants to speak."

"Not only does having a child really increase your carbon footprint, but we are living on an earth where there are a lot of organisms — human, non-human — that are in desperate need of care. And so, for me, if people want to care for children, for animals, whatever, there are cries for care everywhere. I’m asking us to reflect on this idea that we need to reproduce."

"Human exceptionalism is using the Earth, exhausting the Earth, treating the Earth as if the Earth is for us as a resource. We don't act as if we are part of the Earth. And nonhuman animals are beneath us in this schema. And then certain animals are more valid than others. And our measure is based on the equivalence to us rather than on the fact that they are on the Earth … and then within human, we have a similar hierarchy, where white, heterosexual, usually rich men are at the top and then arguably, you know, the rest of us."

"If the United States and other religious fundamentalist countries of any religion see themselves as God's people, all I can say is bring on the Antichrist and End of Days."

"is still a sparse, loose idea advocated by sometimes opposing groups. Most obviously, there is the (VHEMT), the and efilism. VHEMT is somewhat divided between those who wish the human race to cease population in order to eradicate human overpopulation and its exhaustion and destruction of the earth, and those who also choose not to breed but see an apocalyptic horizon and operate under an 'every man for himself' attitude of imminent hedonism 'for tomorrow we die." Ahumanism subscribes to no singular human extinction group, but clearly the message of the former sector of the group is more in keeping with the affirmative benefits of human death."

"The Church of Euthanasia has as its four stations of the cross sodomy, suicide, abortion and cannibalism. In their activism towards the end of human life on the planet, their posthumanism interestingly resonates with human activism. Roughly, these correlate as sodomy with queer (where sodomy is defined as any non-reproductive sexual act, including masturbation, asexuality and heterosexual intercourse with no intention of procreation), abortion with female/feminist sexuate rights, cannibalism with animal rights, where human carcasses are used as a source of food instead of murdering animals, and suicide with agency over one's own life and thus death, including euthanasia with disability rights in reference to the right to die versus the enforcement of life on those who express a wish to die but cannot execute their own death. It shouldn't need to be pointed out that neither group advocates murder or eugenics (however ironically that may sit considering the murder advocated by sanctioned capital and war machines). These are two of the longest established of now many groups advocating human extinction."

"Currently, we see the rise of the deploying , a tactic also utilized by abolitionist and euthanasia groups. The extinction rebellion remains at its heart, because it sees the threat of ecological crisis primarily through the lens of a threat to human survival. It makes no room for the grace of stepping aside and embracing human extinction so that the world may flourish, which would be the most effective form of rebellion against individual death, the death of diversity or species extinction."

"The continuation of diachrony in perceptions of life and death spreads across a form of antinatalism essentially co-opted from a kind of Western fetishism of Buddhism, namely efilism. Coming etymologically from the reverse of 'life', efilism claims it is better never to have been. Efilist philosophers such as David Benatar hinge their arguments on basic binaries of pleasure and pain which roughly correlate to good and bad and extend to a vindication of life and death. Efilism has a vague correspondence with utilitarianism but emphasizes the suffering of life over utilitarianism's greater good. Both are absolute in their perception of the capacity to evaluate which is which, making both dependent on economic measure of value as an either/or, and to an extent both on () determinism. Efilism's redeeming feature is that it promotes antinatalism, and often veganism, in its aspirations to a reduction in suffering, and this attitude promises potentials for opening the world through the cessation of the human."

"However, efilism's claim that all life, human and non-human, should be ceased is a hubris I am not convinced humans have a right to exert. While the cessation of suffering humans cause is already manipulated in a way that could come under an efilist rubric, these 'management' tools usually come in the form of culling populations of nonhumans to redress an imagined environmental balance most usually caused by humans in the first place. Domestic efilism such a neutering rescue animals is necessary, especially when rescuing can involve the speciesism of feeding one slaughtered animal to sustain another, and neutering humans is the logical way to prevent the perpetuation of this practice as well"

"For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species, in spite of plague and war, the latter seeming the ultimately ironic kind of self-serving apocalypse showing the absolute idiocy of the human being the pinnacle of the pyramid of life. While the earth is in the grip of the apocalypse the anthropocene delivers, humans fear an apocalypse that our consumerism, our greed and our narcissism welcomes."

"What is a particle accelerator? ...This is the ...the world's biggest particle accelerator. It's 27 kilometers in circumference ...buried about 100 meters underground between the borders of France and Switzerland, near Geneva."

"That's only one particle accelerator. There are actually over 26,000 of them in the world."

"I'll tell you very briefly how they work. ...The first thing we need is some ...s, or even atoms themselves perhaps."

"Four different types of particles: electrons, s, s and gold atoms. ...Can anyone suggest which one you can't put in a particle accelerator? ...A . Yep! Do you know why? Because it isn't charged. Thank you very much. ...[I]t doesn't have an ."

"Now there's another one... that might not have an electric charge... The gold atom, yes. Can anyone suggest a way to get that gold atom into a particle accelerator? ...You can ionize it. Thank you. So to ionize a gold atom you can rip the electrons off or add more electrons on... Give it an electric charge, and then we can put it into a particle accelerator. So that's the kind of particles we need."

"The next thing we want to do with those particles is to give them some energy. That's the basics of how an accelerator works. I've got a machine here called a which does that..."

"Building up charge, actually building up , is the key to giving particles energy in a particle accelerator. ...Now some of the first particle accelerators were actually genuinely using this mechanism of having a belt and some rollers, and building up lots of voltage. They were called Van de Graaff accelerators. They still exist. I've worked on one... If they're the same charge, which get repelled, and there's force there, they're pushed away and they gain some energy... [I]n the case of an accelerator we'll get our particles... going faster and faster and faster toward the speed of light."

"I have a demonstration... which is the simplest particle accelerator I could make.... in a giant salad bowl. ...[W]hen it goes over the charged strip it picks up the same charge and it gets repelled ...then it hits the grounded strip and it dumps all of that charge, but it keeps its momentum, it keeps rolling around ...So every time it goes over one of those four [repelling] strips ....it gets a kick, or gets accelerated and it gains energy again and again. ...In this demonstration, the ball has to change charge, and fundamental particles don't change charge, so in this case my voltage in constant and the ...[ball] changes charge, in a real accelerator we have a constant charged particle, and that means we have to change the voltage."

"Why couldn't you put your pet in a particle accelerator? ...It doesn't have an electric charge. ...He's slightly too big, and the other thing... he's going to be affected by the vacuum in the pipe of the machine..."

"What I'm going to do is suck out all of the air out of this container and see what happens to marshmallow man, or indeed, what might happen to our pet bunny rabbit in a particle accelerator. ...Oh my gosh it's huge! That's amazing! Sorry, we haven't tested this. I didn't realize it was going to be this good. ...That's probably what would happen to your little bunny rabbit, but in a slightly more horrific fashion."

"So my number two thing you probably shouldn't do with a particle accelerator. You probably shouldn't put your head in the beam... On this one I want to have... a vote... What might kill you first? ...Would your head freeze because of the ? It's at minus 271 degrees Celsius] in some accelerators... take the Large Hadron Collider for example. There the magnets are pretty cold, or would the heat from the beam make your head explode, or would your head explode from the , or would you die from the dose? ...I want a show of hands for which one you think would get you first."

"It depends on which accelerator we're talking about, but let's consider the . ...It's minus 271 degrees. ...This is a picture of one of the 15m long s, one of the [beam] bending magnets in the machine... but it's extremely difficult to get your head in there. So... you wouldn't stick your head in the dipole. You'd stick it in somewhere easier... that wasn't cooled down to minus 271."

"What about the ? ...People have done studies in outer space of astronauts and how long they could survive in the vacuum... That information say that you can survive in outer space with your spacesuit open for about ten seconds before you're ripped apart by the vacuum. So I don't think that's going to get you first."

"So what about the heat from the beam? Well this is a challenge... [I]t's actually incredibly difficult to stop the beam, and if you put your head in front of the beam... it would actually go straight through and out the other side. In fact it has enough energy to go through your head and out the other side about 100,000 times before it loses all it's energy... [T]hat's actually one of the issues they had to deal with when designing the machine, is how do you stop the beam... [W]e want to stop it occasionally, intentionally..."

"So they had to put a lot of effort into designing... the , which is a massive long block of very dense , which absorbs the energy. But even then there's so much energy that they can't just dump it directly on it, or the would make the thing explode. So they actually have to paint the beam in... a swirly pattern... to spread out the load of the heat from the beam on this huge graphite block."

"If you just put this beam onto a massive block of copper, you could actually melt 600 tons of copper from solid to liquid, just using the Large Hadron Collider beam."

"So it's interesting, even though it seems like a stupid question to say what would happen if you stuck your head in it. It does actually present some interesting real problems in engineering, in actually designing these machines."

"Radiation effects. ...There's this guy, , who... before the days of such strict health and safety, somehow managed to bypass a safety mechanism on an accelerator, and stick his head in a 76 GeV proton beam. Now that's quite a lot lower than the Large Hadron Collider beam, but the amazing thing is that he just saw a really bright flash, and he didn't feel any pain at all... Most people think, "Well, this beam, it's got lots of energy. It will just destroy you" but actually that's not quite what happened. ...[A]fter it happened his face swelled right up and the skin on that side pealed off, but he didn't die. ...[H]e went on to get his PhD and... he worked as a scientist for many years... [H]e's actally still alive in Russia, living in relative obscurity. ...A journalist interviewed him few years ago and... because the side of his face that the beam irradiated was paralyzed... and he hasn't been able to move the skin on that side of his face for so many years. That side of his face like it was... the day that this accident occurred. When I... read this, I was like, "Miracle cure for aging!" Yea, paralyzed face is probably not a miracle cure..."

"So you can actually put your head in the beam of an accelerator and survive it. And he's not the only one to have done it."

"In the days of Cockroft and Walton, when they were first developing particle accelerators they didn't know about the dangers of radiation, and so one of the ways that they counted the events... what was happening in their experiments, was... to sit... under the beam. The beam would come down, some nuclear reaction would happen, and... his fluorescent screen... would light up every time what they were looking for happened... [T]hey would sit there and count each time it lit up, sitting underneath the beam, being irradiated. ...[T]hese people lived relatively healthy lives, and Cockroft and Walton got a for work, which doesn't justify it, but there have been people who have stuck their heads in particle accelerators."

"Nowadays you wouldn't want to do that voluntarily, and you wouldn't want to do it without understanding the consequences, but there are some situations that you might want to do it in... [T]here's a very good reason for that, because if you take a much lower energy beam that the Large Hadron Collider beam, and you put it into water, or into the human body, or into tissue and you start it with the correct amount of energy, it will actually slow down and stop, and deposit almost all of its dose (or its energy) in one spot... [W]e call this the ."

"Now the radiation dose that the LHC beam could give you could kill you 76,000 times over, but the radiation dose you'd receive from a beam of say 200 MeV, a relatively modest proton beam, is much lower and can... be used to treat cancer... [W]e use this in... , which we're getting in the UK. We actually did pioneer it and... it hasn't quite come back onto the NHS yet..."

"[I]n cancer therapy usually you like to direct a dose of radiation exactly where you'd like it, so in this case... a child with a spine that needs irradiating. They've had a tumor removed from the base of the skull and they need to irradiate the spine in order to stop the cancer spreading down the spine... With... usual X-ray radiotherapy the dose distribution there is the best that we can do using all modern techniques. You can see that underneath the spine in... the stomach area there is quite a lot of radiation dose that we might not want..."

"If you use protons instead you can... get a much better defined distribution of the dose and this is really a fantastic treatment. It is more expensive than x-ray radiotherapy, but based on the basic physics of how a beam reacts inside... the body, or inside tissue... it's a fantastic treatment, and one that we should look forward to using in the future."

"So it sounded like a crazy question, but if you had a brain tumor you might very well want to stick your head in the beam of a particle accelerator."

"Number three. Don't use a particle accelerator as a death ray. When I was putting together this lecture I asked... my very esteemed colleagues, "Has anyone ever tried to develop an accelerator as a weapon?" And they said, "Oh mumble, mumble cold war, space, Star Wars something or other... No" That was their conclusion... They were wrong."

"People in the U.S. did think about building a particle accelerator (a neutral beam accelerator) that they would launch into space... and then they would use it to shoot down satellites and... missiles and destroy anything that they didn't like, because they were going to have this super powerful beam in space."

"Well they quickly realized that this was crazy, and that they were never going to be able to actually make a weapon out of one of these machines. Mostly for the reasons that I explained before. Even if you had the Large Hadron Collider in space, I have no idea how you'd get it up there, but even if you did, it would... be difficult to do damage with it. Mostly because beams would just go through things and out the other side."

"But they did, in fact. One of the interesting things I discovered, they did put a particle accelerator in space, which I think is fantastic."

"They developed this machine which was only about this big [~1 meter] and they used ultra-lightweight materials, and it only weighed about 50 kg. So compare that with a 27 kilometer long ring. ...It was only low energy but they... sent it up in a rocket and they actually tested it in space and brought it back down... and they tested it again on earth, and it still worked, which I think is an incredible feat of engineering... [P]eople really haven't heard of this experiment... It's called the BEAR (Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket) project in 1989, and I have a contact who worked on it..."

"So we can't use it as a weapon. ...No deployed weapon has ever used this technology."

"What could you do... if you took particle accelerators, and you made them really powerful... [T]his is something that I work on, is taking proton accelerators of relatively low energy, but putting more and more particles in, and getting a really high beam power..."

"[O]ne of the reasons we want to do this is because we want to drive... an . This is where you take a , a fission reactor. In the core, instead of having , it has an element called , which is... much more abundant, and you don't have to refine it. You can use all of it. Hook up to the reactor a particle accelerator, a very high power proton accelerator. So the protons come in and they smash into a heavy metal target and create s... [T]hose neutrons... drive the reaction in the reactor, so without the accelerator there, the reactor is subcritical. It doesn't produce energy. It doesn't sustain a , but once you add in the accelerator you can continue to drive the reaction and generate energy... [I]n fact you could transmute existing nuclear waste into something much shorter lived and much safer."

"So there's some really interesting applications of accelerators, way outside of the realm of particle physics, that we're starting to get a handle on."

"The only problem is [that] the accelerator for this is about 10 times more powerful... than we can currently make. So there's lots of challenges for people like me who design accelerators, to try and come up with ways of making them more and more powerful, for very good reason."

"So we can't use it as a weapon of mass destruction. This is another one... that someone told me that you shouldn't do with a particle accelerator... [Y]ou shouldn't eat it, which is true."

"There's this guy called Monsier Mangetout... a Frenchman who, according to Wikipedia ate all of these crazy things. Even he, though, wouldn't eat a particle accelerator because parts of the machine become radioactive, and while he seems to be fairly stupid, given the things he ate, even he wouldn't go that far."

"So what is ? It's energy in the form of moving particles or waves, emitted by an atom or another body as it changes from one energy state to another. That's the official definition."

"[Y]ou can have two... main types of radiation, which are ionizing, or non-ionizing."

"Now is the stuff that does us damage, and there's three... types... called alpha, beta and gamma radiation. ...Alpha radiation won't go through your hand, beta radiation won't go through a piece of aluminum [a few millimeters thick] and gamma radiation is penetrating and won't go through a big piece of ."

"The interesting thing about radiation is it is naturally present in most of the things around us. ...How many bananas do you think you'd have to eat to get a dose of radiation that would make you sick? ...It's the in the bananas. ...A very small percentage of the potassium is naturally radioactive, but you... have to eat five million... in one sitting to get sick..."

"That thing... is radioactive. They're called thoriated rods, and they're used in welding. You can... just buy them."

"This thing... is a , and it will tell us whether these things are radioactive. ...There is something coming off [clicking noise from the thoriated rods] there. Just to demonstrate that the bananas are really only mildly radioactive, we can't pick them up with a Geiger counter. It's really is very mild."

"So when we're thinking about radiation and radioactivity, it is worth keeping in mind that just the fact that something is radioactive does not means it's harmful..."

"There are foods which are naturally radioactive, but most of us would like to think we've never eaten food that actually been in a particle accelerator. ...That sounds a bit crazy. ...In the UK we don't eat many things that have in a particle accelerator but things like herbs and spices, and some other things occasionally go through a process called cold pasteurization, electronic pasteurization, which uses electrons from a to treat the food. ...It is legal in the UK and in the EU, and it's fully authorized... [T]here's a number of foods... which have been irradiated, or could have been irradiated, and that goes... from bananas, sometimes... to slow down the ripening process... so they have a longer shelf life... [A]s you increase the amount of radiation that these things are treated with... from some grains, seafood to kill bacteria, herbs and spices are a more common one, and then even sometimes higher doses on things like poultry, to kill ."

"In the U.S. if you see this green symbol on your food, that doesn't mean it's organic. It means it's been irradiated, which is a little bit misleading..."

"This is not a dangerous process. In fact it's a really really useful process to kill the bacteria in our food and make it healthy for human consumption, and just because we've irradiated it does not mean that it becomes radioactive. So there's a distinct difference here between a naturally radioactive food, or something [like a thoriated rod] which would be genuinely harmful to me if I ate it, and food which has been irradiated, because it's only gone through that process to treat it to make it fit for human consumption."

"A lot of s' food is irradiated before they send it up so that they... aren't going to get sick from it."

"So yes, you probably have eaten something that's been through a ..."

"So the final thing that you probably shouldn't do with a particle accelerator is: You probably shouldn't destroy the Earth with it. ...People seem to think that when we design new massive particle accelerators that are going to have particles that are huge energies that we've never created before in the lab, that somehow... we just built it for the lulls, and then we're going to destroy the earth with it, and that we haven't quite thought it through, and that we're not quite sure what we're doing... If you're at all concerned, please go to HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com and... you can tell me what you find there."

"In answer to some of the questions that we had a few years ago when the Large Hadron Collider started up... "Could it destroy the world?" ...The most convincing answer to me as to why it couldn't, is because we have particles in outer space from cosmic rays and things like that, at much much higher energies than we could ever dream of creating in the lab. And so far they haven't done anything catastrophic to us and we're perfectly fine. So in terms of just reaching a higher and higher energy... it doesn't really matter what we do in the lab. We should be safe on earth from these high energy particles."

"[I]f we start creating things like mini black holes, which we may or may not, they will pop out of existence so quickly that they wouldn't have time to suck any matter in... [T]he interesting message that I take from this is that these machines are built so infrequently... 25-30 years between these big accelerators. Every time it happens, I'm told by my... retired colleagues... It happens every time, this scare story that we're going to destroy the earth with it, because it's so long between them that people actually forget the media hype that happened the last time around."

"So I'm tasking you with the job. When you're older and one of these machines starts up, and people start going, "It's going to destroy the earth!" That you think uh-huh, I've heard this before. It's not really going to happen."

"[S]ometimes some of our craziest ideas, and I've been through some pretty crazy ideas of things that you could do with a particle accelerator here... [S]ometimes they turn out to be surprisingly good ones if you do them in the right way, and these machines are not just useful for particle physics. They're useful for all sorts of other things like cancer treatment, like killing bacteria in food, and other things I haven't discussed like carbon dating, and imaging down to the atomic scale, and all sorts of other things..."

"I'd just like to leave you with my advice in choosing your career... [F]ind something that makes you sit up and think, "This is really important" or "This is fascinating" or "This is what I'm passionate about" and it can be in any area... Something like space might get you, of climate change... you might really like astronomy, or you might be more passionate about world hunger, injustices in the world, the availability of water, energy, health, aging, anything like that. Think about it, and do something about it. That's all, really, you need to do, and make a career out of doing something about it. Because if you do something that you're passionate about, and you love... You're not even going to feel like you're going to work each day. ...You're just going to feel like you're getting up and you're doing what it is that you're passionate about..."

"[D]on't be afraid to challenge yourself. Don't shy off doing something just because you think that it's hard. It's when we're doing something hard that we really make a difference. So dig deep and don't be afraid to dream."

"I will leave you with some photographs of some of the places that my career in physics has taken me so far, and I hope to add many more to this list in the future."

"So that's 5 things you should never do with a particle accelerator. Thank you."

"So my name's Suzie. I'm a physicist... an accelerator physicist, and I work at the University of Oxford. I run a research group there in... high intensity s... I... spend half my time at Harwell campus... I'm also a member of the , not the other ISIS, just to be clear."

"What I'm going to talk about today is the fascinating world, and I really think it's wonderful, of particle accelerators."

"Has anyone heard of a particle accelerator other than the Large Hadron Collider? ...We actually have two at Harwell... If you were pushed, could you give a back of the envelope explanation of how a particle accelerator works?"

"Most people now, when I say particle accelerator, think of... the bohemoth. This is the . It is almost 27 km in circumference, which is why the tunnel looks almost straight. It's about 100 meters underground, over the border between France and Switzerland. ...Inside these magnets here, these big blue long ones it's one of the coldest places in the universe at 1.9°K above . ...[I]t accelerates two beams of s, from inside the atom, in opposite directions at 99.99999% (that's the exact number) of the speed of light and smashes them into each other... [I]t is what I like to call an impressive shiny huge piece of kit that's bigger than everyone else's!"

"This... is only one in the world... there are actually about 35,000 of them..."

"So why was that particular one built? ...I don't have time to give you a crash course in particle physics. Are there any particle physicist in the room..? No, I'm safe. It's fine, okay. No, I used to be one, and then I switched fields."

"The reason the Large Hadron Collider was built was... to... investigate the fundamental constituents of matter..."

"[I]nside the atom there are only... three different types of particles, which are the up and s, they're the constituents of s and s inside the atom, and the electron. Everything else there plays very little role in our day-to-day lives. But over about the last century we've discovered that all of these particles fit together in a neat theory that describes our universe to something like 9 or 10 decimal places. It is an incredible amount of discovery and work that's gone into it, and I cannot do it justice in... two minutes. But the latest piece that we've discovered using the Large Hadron Collider, and one of the reasons, but not the only reason that it was built, was to discover... the Higgs boson."

"[T]he way that we've learned all of this stuff about the universe is by taking the particles... smashing them into each other, and literally seeing what comes out."

"[I]f you take Einstein's equation E=mc2, E is energy, m is the mass and c is 299,792,458 meters per second, so that squared, I'd have to get to tell me what that is, but that's a very big number. So it takes an enormous amount of energy to create even a tiny tiny amount of matter. So that's why, over the years, our machines have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and reached up to higher and higher energies in order to create particles of higher and higher masses. Now that might seem slightly counterintuitive, but if we look down at the low energy scale, we get our... everyday objects, and in fact up here at sort of 10 MeV, which is like a sort of everyday energy scale, are the up and s where our s and s are created from. And if we go up in energy scale, we slowly... over time discovered all these other types of s and s, and all these other things that seem to play no role in our everyday lives."

"And if you go up and up and up and up, we understand how the different forces in the universe work, from electromagnetism to the strong and weak nuclear force, and then finally right at the top we get to this Higgs thing, which is the theory behind why all of the other particles in the Standard Model have a ."

"The amazing thing about this collection of particles, which admittedly looks arbitrary until you learn it in more detail, is that you can take the entire description of every known particle and interaction, other than gravity, in the universe, and write it down on a mug."

"[T]his is called the Standard Model Lagrangian, that curly \mathcal{L} at the start is for Lagrangian... and there's lots of different components of that. Now if I write it out in full, I get what is the most egotistical physics teacher in the entire world. So if I wrote it out in full... really you don't need to read it, I promise, all of the different terms in that equation describe an interaction between different types of particles and force carriers..."

"[Y]ou may have seen... when the LHC was in the news, diagrams that look a little bit like this. These are called s after the famous physicist, Richard Feynman... [W]hat... most of my colleagues in particle physics do, is they take this [full Standard Model] equation, they figure out which particle's interacting and how: what's coming in, what coming out. They do twenty-one pages of calculations, and they come out with a number that is the probability of that interaction happening... [D]epending on which particles go in, you choose a different term that corresponds to those, and which particle comes out, you choose a different term that corresponds to those. Turn the handle and you get your result out the other end. I just taught you quantum field theory in about 2 seconds."

"It's really hard to convey in a few minutes, how amazing it is that we know this about the universe, and the predictive power that it has... [T]hat is the reason why we really built the Large Hadron Collider."

"But I'm not, anymore, a particle physicist. I'm a particle accelerator physicist, and so it's my job to understand how to build the machines that we use in this field. And so I briefly want to run down... how these amazing machines actally operate."

"I want to go back to about the late 1920s and 1930s when a new type of was invented, called the . These are still in operation today, but the original ones... This is a patent from... and this is 2 Ds as we call them... electrical cavities which would sit inside a whopping great ... [W]e start in the center with some particles, and they always have to be charged particles. So either electrons, s... s, charged atoms. Things like that, and we give them a bit of a kick, because there is a voltage between these two [Ds] halves, and each time the particle moves between those two halves they get a little bit of a kick, a little bit of energy. Now because they're sitting in a whopping great magnetic field, the effect... that has on a charged particle is to actually bend it around a corner. So it bends around a corner and it comes back again crossing this gap, gaining a little bit more energy and... as it continues to gain energy it spirals out... So the limit in the energy in this machine is mostly how big you can build your magnet, and how much iron you're willing to afford. Now this really was the original type of... high energy particle accelerator, and this is a photograph of Ernest Lawrence and his student Milton Stanley Livingston, who I should say, actually built the thing... [T]his machine got up to about 1 million s."

"In physics I use this energy range of s which means the energy an electron would gain if I put it through a potential of 1 . So MeV is million electronvolts. And that's the scale of that... [cyclotron] they're standing next to..."

"So we still use a few cyclotrons, but most of the machines that people talk about, especially in the media, are a different type of machine which we call a , and we have two of these types of machines at the Rutherford lab at Harwell. One is the ISIS Neutron Source that I'm associated with, and there's also the ..."

"[S]ynchrotrons are fascinating machines. The original idea was actually from an Aussie... called Marcus Oliphant and the idea here... instead of them having particles that start in the center and spiral outwards... you keep the particles confined to one , one , and as the particles gain energy you increase the field in the magnets, the magnetic field, in time with the energy gained, in order to keep them going around in the same path."

"If you look at a real one... the ISIS synchrotron. There are 10 sections that look almost identical... and you have these big yellow magnets... They're... s. They bend the beam around, and then there's two other main components. There are ... and... a radiofrequency cavity. Now this is basically a big box like your microwave, into which we pump electromagnetic waves, and this sets up a inside there, and you have to time the voltage of that standing wave with the passage of the particles in order to get them to accelerate."

"Now it's not obvious to most people how this acceleration mechanism of using a wave to accelerate particles actually works. So I have a little demonstration... of an everyday example where I can use a wave to accelerate some particles. This is just an ordinary fluorescent tube that you have in the ceiling... Over here I have a plasma ball which has a 30 kHz oscillating AC voltage supply. So there's a voltage, it's a couple of kilovolts that's going up and down, up and down, up and down in the center of that thing, 30,000 times a second. And because of that, out of the plasma ball... comes an electromagnetic wave that's traveling... through space. So move towards the plasma ball and point the fluorescent tube toward the plasma ball. [It lights up] ...So actually if you move it away, notice that it's still on. Now a lot of people show this demonstration with the fluorescent tube touching the plasma ball and say that it's something about completing a circuit... It's not. It's the electromagnetic wave that's coming out... which is traveling through the fluorescent tube, exciting the electrons inside. ...you know how a fluorescent tube works."

"Try something for me. ...Hold [the tube] halfway down. [Half of the lamp goes out] ...You're grounding any of the electrons which are... moving inside there..."

"So that's one example of how a wave can be used to accelerate particles, but... I brought along some scale model protons [large beach balls] and I thought what I'd get you to do is for you guys to be the wave and the scale model protons are going to accelerate across the wave [beach balls moved by audience hand wave]... Eleven-year-olds do this really well, I'm warning you. You've got competition."

"I mean you guys are a rubbish accelerator, but we do that very very precisely. ...So what happens in a synchrotron... is that you have to time that wave very very precisely with the increase in the magnetic field in order to get the particles all synchronized, and that's why we call it a synchrotron."

"[A]... Large Hadron Collider radiofrequency cavity... is one of the devices, and... operates at... superconducting temperature at 400 MHz... [T]his is one of the devices into which we pump a large amount of RF energy, send the particles through and as they go through, as you demonstrated very nicely, they gain a little bit of energy..."

"This is actually a real one. ...This is ...the smallest radiofrequency accelerating cavity in the world... This one is from a project called the which is one idea of the next generation of colliders to reach even more precise measurements in particle physics, and the inside of this thing is machined to a sub-micron precision... [T]here's a hole at the end. ...This one's for electrons, which are a very small beam, so it can be very small hole, and they travel through there. ...These are the RF ports. These are the vacuum ports. ...[T]his thing would give an electron an energy gain of ...probably 10 million electron volts. This is also a very very high gradient cavity so it gives a lot of energy in a very small space. ...The higher the frequency the smaller they get. ...That one operates at 30 GHz. It was actually so small and the machining tolerances were so tight that they've actually decided to go for 12 GHz instead... because it makes the engineering slightly easier."

"I'd just been asked by four particle physics professors... my PhD interview was conducted over an unstable internet connection... "what do you find fascinating about particle physics?" ...I told them of my wonder at the way physics seemed to be able to describe everything: from the smallest s to the atoms that make up our bodies, up to the largest scales of the Universe, and how all of this was connected. Particle physics, I said, was the foundation of it all."

"Five years earlier... [a]s my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the true wonder of this designated "dark sky site" revealed itself. ...The stars and planets weren't up there and I wasn't down here: it was all part of one enormous physical system called the Universe. I was a part of it too. ...I'd never really felt my place in it until that moment."

"Suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted to know... about gravity and particles and and relativity. About stars and atoms and light and energy. Above all, I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected to it. ...[I]t mattered to me as a human ...if I managed it even a little bit, I'd not have wasted this little blip of time as a conscious being. I decided to become a physicist."

"[A]s I studied more physics the question... at the core... was: "What is matter, and how does it interact to create everything around us—including ourselves?""

"I suppose I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own existence. ...I went about it in a more indirect way: I set about trying to understand the entire Universe."

"Our view of the smallest constituents in nature has changed rapidly in the last 120 years... Some way into the twentieth century this work became known as "high-energy physics,"... Today the study of all the many particles and how they formed, behave and transform is simply called particle physics."

"The Standard Model of particle physics classifies all known particles in nature and the forces through which they interact. ...[O]ur current version came about in the 1970s. This theory is an absolute triumph: it is mathematically elegant and unbelievably precise, yet it fits on the side of a mug."

"The Standard Model tells us that all the matter that makes up our everyday existence is composed of just three particles. ...[T]wo types of s called "up" and "down" which forms our s and s. These... with the electrons make up atoms, held together by forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces."

"The reason we can say today that we know all this stuff, that we think our theoretical models represent reality, is not because we have pretty mathematics but because we have done experiments."

"[E]xperiments take us to that frightening frontier of vulnerability: the real world."

"While a theoretical physicist's ideas must take into account the results of experiments, an experimental physicist has a more nuanced job. She is not simply testing out the ideas of theoretical physicists; she is asking her own questions and designing and physically building equipment she can use to test those ideas. ...[H]er practical knowledge ranges from to chemistry, from to ."

"Over the last century the experiments... have gone from single-room setups led by one person to the largest machines on Earth. The era of "Big Science," which began in the 1950s... now... involve collaborations of over a hundred countries and tens of thousands of scientists. ...[N]o individual country can achieve these feats alone."

"Accelerator physicists constantly discover new ways of creating beams to help learn... about particle physics. ...[T]he nearest hospital almost certainly houses a particle accelerator. ...We build particle accelerators to study viruses, chocolate and ancient scrolls."

"In this book, I will take you through twelve key experiments that marked... a discovery... we now see as essential to our understanding of the world... [T]hese experiments embody the spirit of enquiry that stems from human curiosity. ...[T]hey have changed our lives in almost every aspect, from computing to medicine, from energy to communications and from art to archaeology."

"Physics will always be, at its core, about understanding our place in the Universe..."

"Beginning with the discovery of s, Sheehy... continues... through a series of experiments that led to the discoveries of the electron (1897), atomic nucleus (1911), and measurement of the (1923). By the end of the first third of the book the theory that the atom is the smallest piece of matter is in tatters and the remaining chapters of the book describe the fascinating experiments physicists designed to better understand the particles that make up an atom."

"Later sections... describe the gargantuan instruments that enabled scientists to detect... elusive particles at the heart of the standard model... as the and... Higgs boson. Through each tale, The Matter of Everything explores how the pursuit of basic science has led to unexpected discoveries... These findings now underpin cancer treatments, personal electronics, and... how scientists investigate the way lava flows deep below Earth’s surface. Sheehy carefully considers each of these breakthroughs through the lens of the people who defied the odds to uncover the mysteries of our universe."

"Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe—appearing either as the Cringe Direct, or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of the Blatant Blatherskite, the God's-Own-Country and I'm-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian bore."