Volume 122 · No. 22
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
EST. 1887
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@lsureveille
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HASKELL WHITTINGTON / The Daily Reveille
FACE OFF
Amid ongoing controversy surrounding a recent fraternity banner and ahead of a performance by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos tonight in the Student Union, free speech is once again a topic of contentious student discussion. In today’s issue, two columnists debate the merits — and limits — of the First Amendment on the University’s campus.
ALL’S NAIR IN LOVE AND WAR ANJANA NAIR @anjanaaanair
Free speech argument should not be used to justify hate speech
Free speech warrior Yiannopoulos upholds American values, troll culture
The controversy over the line between hate speech and free speech has always been a fight between conservatives who cite the First Amendment as their only credible rationale and liberals who aren’t even sure how to define hate speech. Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, America has had to deal with a candidate who embodies and exemplifies this controversy and forces us to confront it. I once thought I loved free speech. As someone involved in media, the First Amendment was my best friend. That is, until I faced the reality that people, like they do to all good things in the world, abuse it and use it as justification for reckless and hateful behavior. One of the main proponents of this pseudo-patriotic ideology is a man is bringing his controversy to an already
Freedom of speech is as American as the image of Abraham Lincoln straddling a mammoth grizzly bear with an American flag saddle, holding an assault rifle in one hand and the Constitution in the other, whose recognition is a prerequisite for Young Metro’s trust, probably. Upholding that right on college campuses is an integral element in ensuring the proper fostering of the brightest young minds America has to offer. Freedom of speech’s oppression, be it for political reasons or anything of the sort, massacres intellectual vitality that prevails where it’s allowed free reign. Unfortunately, an existing faction on our campus and the larger community only support freedom of speech in a limited capacity, seemingly exclusively when it aligns with their views. Harambe didn’t die for this.
see NAIR, page 2
see HAMILTON, page 2
TEAM JACOB JACOB HAMILTON @jac0b_hamilt0n
MOVIES AND TV
‘Stranger Things’ lacks accuracy, professor Pullin says BY LAUREN HEFFKER @laurheffker Netflix’s smash hit of the summer “Stranger Things” may walk the line between sci-fi and horror, but the show doesn’t deliver on scientific accuracy, according to University physics professor Jorge Pullin. The show’s Spielberg-esque plot follows a group of children that spend the majority of the season attempting to rescue 12-yearold Will Byers, their friend who was kidnapped by a mysterious creature. Later in the show, viewers learn Byers was taken to a parallel universe that appears to coexist with his own world, dubbed the “Upside-Down.” A point of entry to
the Upside-Down originates from a mysterious government organization, the Hawkins National Laboratory. The energy department is the headquarters for scientific experimentation on telekinesis. The storyline of Eleven, a psychokinetic girl who escapes from the government facility and encounters Byer’s friends in the woods, accompanies the main plot. “The series is trying to get on the right track in thinking that energy and electricity can produce some sort of anomaly,” said Pullin, who holds the University’s Hearne Chair of Theoretical Physics and conducts research in general relativity and quantum gravity. “What they’re driving is the idea of black holes — if you compress mass, you can create a region in spacetime
where nothing can get out.” While they make for good TV, the scientific concepts presented in “Stranger Things,” including traveling between dimensions, don’t measure up in reality, Pullin said. The presence of another dimension in conjunction with our world, like the one in “Stranger Things,” is impossible, Pullin said. To produce a black hole on Earth, the planet would need to be an inch in size, Pullin said. The amount of energy required to form a black hole isn’t feasible on Earth, and a black hole is much more dense and energetic than anything that can travel through a phone line. “They have some decent ideas
see STRANGER THINGS, page 2
courtesy of LSU PHYSICS and WIKIPEDIA
Netflix’s summer smash hit ‘Stranger Things’ is not scientifically accurate according to University physics professor Jorge Pullin, whose research focuses on black holes.