“We’re gonna start by talking about the press, because that’s a very important part of this course, as we all know," Professor Emlyn Hughes said in his final Frontiers of Science lecture of the semester.
Except for a few minutes of video, today's lecture was unremarkable, focusing on the topic at hand---the Large Hadron Collider and particle physics.
However, at the end, Hughes took more than 10 minutes for an "off-the-record" denouement of his trio of sometimes entertaining, sometimes confusing, sometimes controversial lectures.
Without further ado, here are some highlights from his speech:
"I had a dream before coming to this course ... I knew I was gonna cause a real mess, okay? There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was going to cause controversy and this is gonna be all over the map. And I actually thought, so what? So I'm gonna blow up the freshman class at Columbia, you know, big deal, and maybe---maybe, if I'm really successful, I doubt this is gonna happen, but---maybe I'll make it into the Columbia Spectator. ... Maybe that will happen, that would be kind of cool. ... So that was a dream that came true, I guess."
"Look, is Obama, during your four years, ever gonna visit campus? Yeah, he came and he gave a talk at Barnard. But is he ever gonna visit Columbia campus? Make it your goal to get that guy here because he can't resist talking to you about this issue because you've made so much goddamn noise that there's no way, you know, that they cannot listen. This ... would be my big, big dream."
"I've avoided the press like---you wouldn't believe what the press has done to me. ... I know what it's like to be a Hollywood star now. I wasn't famous two weeks ago."
