(First, shameless self promotion: I have a website, and I wrote a book that you can read on said website. To get to all these things--along with a bevy of essays that are snappy and witty, thank you very much--click here.)
An update: I've had, honest, 102 views of my blog from the Ukraine. And yesterday, I got two views from Saudi Arabia.
Anyway:
When I need something to write about, I turn to a wonderful book called The Observation Deck that offers fifty prompts for writing. (Writers take note: you can get a copy of it by clicking here).
One of the prompts is "consult the news."
In "consult the news," you go through news stories and write about something. For example, this prompt says, a small New York Times article was the spark for Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I was not aware, until I read this particular prompt, that the book--the true story of two miscreants, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who murdered the Clutter family in rural Kansas when a burglary went horribly wrong--began with a one column piece buried deep inside the paper.
It other words, the smallest thing can get you writing. And as I think about the smallest thing, my mind turns to the discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that physicist Leon Lederman called "The God Particle (many other physicists hate this term, by the way, because it sensationalizes the whole thing; still, it's way cool)."
Without getting too technical, the search for the Higgs boson is one of the reasons that, a few years ago, they built a massive, multi-billion dollar particle accelerator underneath Switzerland (and parts of France, I think). Deep beneath Switzerland (and France, I think) subatomic particles travel 17 miles in an instant, and hit each other. When this happens, the particles break open, revealing even tinier particles.
In 1964, Peter Higgs, along with five other physicists (Robert Brout, Francois Englerts, Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble) first theorized the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle that is, to particle physicists, what Hydrogen is to chemists...that is, the building block of, well, everything, the "something" that gives everything mass (and thank you Wikipedia, and I apologize if I got any names or details wrong). Since then, scientists have tried to get a "sample" of this particle with a particle accelerator.
And yesterday, it seems as if they did just that. I loved reading about how 83 year-old Peter Higgs got to see, in his lifetime, the confirmation of a theory he formulated almost 50 years ago.
(And also, by the way: here's an article that explains this way better then I did.)
(A disclaimer: the discovery of this particle is still tentative, by the way, but still, the team of scientists are almost certain that they were successful.)
Instantly, as the news kept churning out with information about the "search for the Higgs boson," I could not help but imagine physicists reduced to subatomic size, all of them wearing pith helmets, accompanied by a subatomic camera crew for a subatomic Discovery Channel special.
"Ah, the Higgs boson particle," the voice over in my mind said, as I imagined watching subatomic television, "since a team of physicists first theorized its existence in 1964, it has been camera shy. But now, for the first time, we're able to record this particle in its natural habitat."
Instantly (for I'm afraid this is the way my mind works), I saw these subatomic naturalists parting subatomic reeds, and gasping as, for the first time, subatomic cameras caught this subatomic particle that sort of looked like a subatomic koala bear, munching on subatomic eucalyptus.
Then I imagined these same scientists domesticating these particles, and imagined subatomic families going to subatomic stray particle shelters, adopting little bosons, quarks and leptons. I imagined these families spoiling those particles, so that they ran all over the subatomic house, chewing on subatomic furniture and barking so as to keep subatomic neighbors late at night.
Then it became necessary to call a subatomic Caesar Millan, "The Fermion Whisperer," who said stuff like "just because he gives the universe mass does not mean that you can let him push you around. You must be the atom, the particle leader, and realize that your fermion is in YOUR orbit, not the other way around."
"You must exercise your particle every day, and show him who's boss" this subatomic Caesar Milan said, "or else the particle will get angry, and enter the red zone, where it will feel as if it must fight. And this is when I get calls from people who say 'my little pet is destroying the fabric of the universe.'"
Finally, this subatomic Caesar Milan looks all thoughtful and reflective, in a Heisenbergian sort of way:
"Buy there is something even more important to think about," he says. "If you're not there to observe your little darling misbehaving, is he even misbehaving at all? There's so much uncertainty here."
So this is what happens when I consult the news. This is my problem.
Any enterprising readers/writers who wish to consult the news will, doubt, come up with something far less glib, and--appropriately enough for a post that's all about the mass of the universe--far more substantial.
(Speaking of which, I just thought of a joke:
Q: What did the Higgs boson particle with self esteem issues say to his therapist?
A: "I just don't feel like my existence is substantial in any way.")
(And an old Higgs boson joke that I just came across in that article to which the link above takes you:
A Higgs boson particle walks into a Catholic church. The priest says "we don't allow hypothetical particles in here." The Higgs boson says "but without me, you can't have mass!")
I gotta go.
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