(BEAUTIFUL, NO?)
Mama spent the whole morning trying to explain the Higgs field, and boson, named after Peter Higgs who first theorized that it existed, and the Higgs field to me and I’m not sure she understands anything at all about it and only wish our friend Martin, the physicist, was around right now because HE could explain it much better (no offense, mama, but maybe a little more homework on the next go-round?)
So, in a nutshell, here’s the gist of it (from Wikipedia):
When you smash particles together, there is a small chance that the mystical, heretofore undiscovered Higgs Boson will appear, so the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland smashed lots of particles together to find it, finally.
But now, mama says, a physicist named Joseph Lykken has a theory (let’s hope it’s only that!) that at some point about 10,000 years from now (!), there will be a radical change in the Higg’s field i.e. an engergy field through which massless particles pass and when doing so are given the property of mass, the process of which is known as the Higgs Effect (more Wikipedia, thank you).
The Higgs Field, according to Mr. Lykken, could someday, as Dennis Overbye in the New York Times says, “twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it.”
No warning before this happens, by the way. I could just be sitting here taking my bath or eating my kibble and SNAP. Zilch. Nothing. Nada. Finito. We’re outta here…
You know, where we came from and how we got here and where we might go has always fascinated me (especially in that half-awake state between snooze and sleep), but the idea that one minute I am and then in a blink of a kitty’s eye, I’m NOT is not an idea that needs my full attention just now.
Plus, there is another guy making his entrance onto the galactic stage, called the top quark! Is that like “top gun” or “top banana”? Anyway, he’s here and throwing lots of physicists into new theories and questions about the Higgs boson, multiple galaxies, Einstein’s theory of relativity and who knows what else?
This kitty figures that somebody surely might come up with an answer since there are 10,000 years to ponder the dilemma…
Should be enough time.
Meanwhile….I’ll get to work.
