Particle Fever

If the Higgs Boson had turned out to be 115 gigaelectonvolts it would have supported the theoretical notion of supersymmetry, filling in the missing piece of the puzzle about the Standard Model of matter. If it had weighed in at 140 it would argued the idea of the multiverse, a concept which led to the frightening idea of chaos, in which the particle itself would prove to be less a key to the understanding of what happened at the time of the big bang than a kind epistemological black hole. As it was in 2012 when the two beams of protons traveling near the speed of light through the l7 mile long LHC actually began to collide, the Boson turned out to be uncooperative coming in about 126 GeV, a number that left more questions than answers and supported neither theory. At one point during Particle Fever Mark Levinson’s almost Socratic dialogue between the experimental and theoretical physicists involved with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, an economist asks how the enormously expensive and time consuming activity can be justified. “What is it good for? “ he demands to know, about a project which for some scientists is comparable in ambition to the building of the Pyramids. “Nothing except understanding everything,” is the response of the David Kaplan, a physicist who is also the film’s narrator. On a more basic level have you ever wondered, what really goes on inside the LHC where the conditions that occurred at the moment of the big bang are duplicated? Have you ever tried to imagine how energy of this scale could be generated (giant super cooled magnets are used) or what it would look like? Then Particle Fever takes you inside the inner workers of a project involving thousands of scientists sometimes from warring counties like Pakistan and India, Georgia and Russia who all work together to try to unearth the secrets of things like the cosmological constant, dark matter and the reason why the universe continues to expand. The reclusive Peter Higgs, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2013 and who doesn’t even own a cellphone or employ the internet (“Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs doesn’t own a cellphone or use the internet,” The Week, 10/8/13), even makes a cameo appearance in a film that unlocks secrets of nature, science and even art.

The Stars Our Destination II

The Times ran a front page story about “the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra” (“Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” NYT, 4/18/13). Naturally, perennially “space" conscious New Yorkers, with little experience of trying to locate space in outer space, will wonder if there is rent stabilization (before they even consider how stable the orbits of the bodies question are)? According to the Times both planets circle a star called Kepler 62  named "after NASA's Kepler 62 spacecraft, which discovered them” and are both “in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” The prospect of affordable space and the citation of Goldilocks make the whole extraterrestrial discovery seem like a rather far flung fairy tale. Indeed getting back to life on earth, hardened Manhattanites would find it more improbable to come across an inexpensive rental than they would to achieve the near speed of light velocities necessary for a rocket ship to get there. But who knows what the future for space travel will hold. No one really understands what space is either in terms of the dark matter that holds things together, nor the dark energy the force which constantly causes things to expand. In studying the Higgs Boson, a basic component of matter, in the Large Hadron Collider scientists are only beginning to understand what happened in the milliseconds following the explosion which created life as we know it today. Did something come out of nothing? Or is there another explanation that still eludes us? When we begin to understand the highways and byways of space in the context of a unified theory which takes into context both the microcosm and macrocosm, will we discover the wormholes that we read about in sci fi and that will allow travellers to make quantum leaps through space/time?

“Mr. Watson--Come here--I Want to See You"

The confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson is reminiscent of Alexander Graham Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” The utterance on March l0, 1876 ushered in the age of modern telecommunications and it was a reference point at least once during the Golden Age of Television when programs like You Are There, hosted by Walter Cronkite, dramatized great moments in history. We’ve come a long way baby, but Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, was hard put to provide a useful answer when asked on CNN the other day about what the discovery of the Higgs Boson will mean for the average Joe. He made some general points about the discovery of the Boson having importance for anyone who is interested in how the universe came to be, but it was hard to surmise how the discovery of the Boson would fare when compared to that of the phone. Take-out Chinese food and escort services are examples of two industries that could not subsist without the phone, but it’s unclear what industries will be improved or created by the Boson. Will the discovery of the mysterious particle have an effect on equally mysterious financial instruments like synthetic derivatives? In some way the discovery of the Higgs Boson, which has represented an investment of billions of dollars in research funds, is too big to be useful. As if to underscore this point, the Times’ Dennis Overbye repeated the same line in his coverage of the event, “Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe,” 7/4/12) as he did on 6/19/12, “New Data on Elusive Particle is Shrouded in Secrecy.” Describing “a cosmic molasses” and the way it helps particles to get mass, he compared it to the way “a bill going through congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.” Only two words changed. In the original piece he used “moving” instead of “going through congress” and “gains” rather than “attracts riders.” When people start to repeat themselves, it usually means they have run out of things to say.

The Higgs Boson Makes Its Way Through Congress

“The particle is named for the University of Edinburgh scientist Peter Higgs, who was one of six physicists who suggested that a sort of cosmic molasses pervading space is what gives particles their heft,” Times science reporting guru Dennis Overbye remarked in a recent piece about the Higgs Boson (“New Data on Elusive Particle is Shrouded in Secrecy,” NYT, 6/19/12). “Particles trying to wade through it gather mass the way a bill moving through Congress gains riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous.” Overbye’s remarks about "the Higgs mechanism, a pervasive field that gives mass to elementary particles" (and he also compared to the difference between paparazzi making their way through ordinary people or celebrities whose “fame” creates an “inertia,”) turns out to be particularly instructive due to what they say about congressional politics. Everyone knows that there are stipulations in congressional bills which either exempt certain institutions like banks, hospitals or stock exchanges from compliance with a regulation, or provide perks for certain constituencies. “If we are building a road, it better not be a road to nowhere,” President Obama famously remarked in a speech following his election. But let’s hope that Overbye’s figure of speech is also characterized by hyperbole. If it turns out that the Higgs Boson does exist and that it’s one of the major building blocks of life as we know it, then if it’s anything comparable to a congressional bill, it’s going be contaminated—as contaminated as pork barrel politics itself. If you think that life is complicated and human motives never pure, it may go back to the original boson which was burdened with appeals to special interests and lobbyists from the moment the big bang hearkened the creation of the universe. Can you imagine a particle comparable to the repeal of Glass-Steagall?

Success and Succession

Determining the order of succession in the new secretive North Korean government of Kim Jong-un, the son of the recently deceased Kim Jong-il is as difficult as discovering the elusive Higgs Boson. As you may recall the Higgs Boson is the tiny particle that scientists have been seeking out for over 40 years. Recently, teams of particle physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva discovered some very encouraging results which would as Columbia physicist Brian Greene recently said in a Times Op-Ed piece, “complete an essential chapter in our quest to understand the basic components of the universe.” (“Waiting for the Higgs Particle, NYT, 12/14/11). So little in fact is known about the North Korean leadership that like understanding the Higgs particle, it would involve in Greene’s words “a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness.” One other thing that the North Korean leadership has in common with the Higgs particle is that any sightings tend to be short-lived. “Finding this particle would be no easy task,” Greene went on to comment. “The Higgs particle would be short-lived, quickly decaying into other, more familiar particles.” Doesn’t that too seem the problem when it comes to determining the ephemeral coterie of officials surrounding around both Kim Jong-il and his anointed successor Kim Jong-un. “Identifying the mourners and absentees in the world’s most closed society is one of the few ways available to outsiders trying to solve the mystery of the unfolding succession in Pyongyang,” Choe Sang-Hun said in a recent Times piece (“Buzz Over Who’s Not in the North Korean Picture(s),” NYT, 12/22 /11). Is it too far a stretch  to think that Angela Landsbury could be brought back to reprise the evil mother she played in Manchurian Candidate to play the role of Kim Ok who Choe Sang-Hun described as “one of Jim Jong-il’s closest aides.” According to Sang-Hun, Kim Jong-un  is “the second son of Kim Jong-il’s third wife” and Kim Ok is now serving “as the North’s de facto first lady since Kim Jong-un’s mother died  in 2004.” Yes we are going from West to East from the extreme right to the extreme left (and beyond), but in our quantum universe where a particle can be in two different places at the same time, nothing is surprising. Lawrence Harvey played Landsbury’s son (Raymond Shaw) in Manchurian Candidate and if he were alive, he would have been the perfect person to play the role of the handsome but baffled looking Kim Jong-un, whose mother Ko Young-hee was a prominent North Korea Opera star. The wild card according to Sang-Hun’s story is Kim Jong-nam (no relation to Viet), the hapless oldest son of Kim Jon-il and the product of KJi's marriage to his first wife who “fell out of favor and was alone in Moscow when she died.” Sang-Hun reports that there were rumors Ko Young-hee, the opera star, had been behind a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-nam who “now lives in effective exile in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macao.” Hopefully, by the time the existence of the Higgs Boson is finally confirmed, more will be revealed about who’s who in Pyongyang.

From Cradle to Grave

Everyone has their day in court, actually two: birth and death. There are exceptions, but the newcomer is generally the most important person in the room, as is the old timer to whom children, friends and relatives have come to pay their last respects. However jaded or cosmopolitan we may feel after reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which proposes eternal life through cybernetic revamping of dying organs, the coming into existence of a human life (no matter how great its potential for evil) and the departing of life from the body still epitomize the fundamental mystery of the universe. Another mystery of course is this: what preceded life? Scientists talk of the big bang and create ever more powerful telescopes, with mirrors capable of collecting emissions billions of light years away, from the dawn of time, yet no one is able to describe what came before the beginning, before the great event during which a microscopic bit of matter or energy ignited the expansion of the universe. One way to study the macrocosm is to study particles in the new LHC (Large Hadron Collider). Scientists hope that the huge amounts of energy produced in the collider, which in turn unleash elementary particles like Higgs bosons, can help us to understand how the universe was created. Another way to come to grips with the enigma of the macrocosm is by going to a hospital and witnessing the contractions that attend birth or the last breaths that attend death, as the body labors both to hold onto and relinquish life.