Reply To: Physics Nobel to Big Bangers

[Rezwan]

OK, back to the peace sign. I just had a bit of an idea. How about flipping the peace sign over? I’ve put it up on the site, don’t know if many people will catch it.

It makes a symbolic difference.

Rezwan wrote: I didn’t know the history of the symbol.
Looking it up on this website, we read that:

Gerald Holtom, a conscientious objector who had worked on a farm in Norfolk during the Second World War, explained that the symbol incorporated the semaphore letters N(uclear) and D(isarmament). He later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, explaining the genesis of his idea in greater, more personal depth:

I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.

Eric Austin added his own interpretation of the design: “the gesture of despair had long been associated with the death of Man and the circle with the unborn child.”

How depressing is that? But now, with aneutronic fusion, the hands are uplifted. It looks like a tree now, growing, expanding.

Also, some Christians are under the impression that the old peace sign is a broken cross and an insult to the Saviour. This flipped symbol obviously is not.