I KNOW NOTHING

I don't know about you but I read stuff in the papers and other publications, notably Scientific American, as well as the books of Oliver Sacks, which I love, and for a little while I think that I actually understand what is going on in the worlds of neuroscience or economics or politics. And then I go away and have a think about it and realize that, in fact, I don't remotely understand these things at all.

This past week there has been a huge event, a historic event, an event which will change the way in which we conceive of the world in which we live. I refer, of course, to the discovery of:

The Higgs Boson.

This is enormous news in the world of physics. 50 years ago, an English physicist, Peter Higgs, postulated that there was a subatomic particle which did something to make energy into matter by giving mass to other subatomic particles. This hypothetical particle was nicknamed the ‘God particle’ and it explained something about the universe and its beginnings. So for 50 years physicists looked for it, in vain. But nowadays there is this humungous machine called the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This machine itself is impossible to understand; it is built underground in a circular tunnel which is 27km in circumference and  cost over 10 billion dollars. It has been running for 2 years now, and it uses gigantic amounts of power to smash subatomic particles together so that physicists can look at the bits that shake loose, somehow, I don’t know, and finally they found what looks like the Higgs Boson. Peter Higgs is very happy and may win a Nobel prize. Apparently everyone cheered when the likelihood of this being a fluke was ‘5 sigma’, which means it’s not a fluke, and this is what they are reporting in the press.

Do you have any idea what any of this means? Neither do I. But I love the analogies which they come up with to explain it. ‘It’s like one basketballer passing a ball to another, and that’s the boson’. Say what?

‘It’s as if Miranda Kerr [a very pretty model] walks through a boys’ school and, as she passes through the school yard, more and more boys come running up and mill around her, so that when she leaves, she is dragging along this mass of schoolboys, and that’s what the boson does.’ Right.

Physics people, give up. The closest any of us mere mortals come to this world is The Big Bang Theory. And we laugh at the genius nerds!

These analogies are on par with Einstein’s explanation of the Theory of Relativity. When asked to explain it in language we could understand, he said something like ‘When you are sitting on a park bench with a pretty girl for an hour, it feels like a second. And when you sit on a hot stove for a second, it feels like an hour.’ Oh, I get it! NOT.

And anyway, I want to know WHO MADE THE HIGGS BOSON.