The God Particle

OK, so I'm reading a Higgs Boson Particle infopanel in the National Museum of Scotland when a 10 year old boy stands next to me and starts reading too.

"Do you understand any of this?" I ask him.

"No," he says. He walks over to the racing car simulator with its queue of 8 jumpy, squealing kids.

Well, neither do I, but I'm not going to admit it.

I can't admit it. This is the same 10 year kid I just smoked in the turn-the-crank-and-light-up-the-light-bulbs exhibit. He only got it up to 2 lights. I got all 5.

That proved my superiority as a human being, and I don't want to cede an inch of it by revealing how little I understand quantum physics.

Not a Place for Thinking

This drama is all being played out in the National Museum of Scotland, the biggest, baddest, loudest building in Edinburgh. It is loud because:

• The building is 2 city blocks long and 4 floors tall. Its 3 atriums cut down through the entire height of the building. This creates 3 huge echo chambers that magnify every teeny tiny sound about 1000 times.
• Every kid in Scotland is there, yelling and screaming and crying at the top of their lungs.

Back in 1866, when children were busy being seen and not heard, I'm sure this was a serene place for quiet contemplation of the mysteries of the universe. But now it is a Chuck E Cheese with 8 quid lattes replacing pizza. Is there any difference between the Eye-to-hand Coordination Simulator and Whack a Mole? None whatsoever.

Still, I cannot wrench myself away from the Science and Technology section. I have 2 hours to kill in the National Museum, and I see about 10% of it. I don't get to see the Lewis Chessmen, Norse chess pieces carved from whale bone in the 12th century. Or the Roman era Cramond Lioness sculpture.

Because I am stuck in the quantum physics department, utterly confused by the Higgs Boson Particle. Otherwise known as the the God Particle.

Your Questions on the God Particle Answered

Well, I've since watched a whole bunch of videos on quantum physics and the Higgs Boson Particle. I still don't get it. But I have to get this blog post out, and I'm contemplating making up some shit.

No, no. If you want dishonesty, there's ChatGPT. I can't compete with AI in the dishonesty department.

Instead, I'm going to answer some of the basic questions I had upon seeing this exhibit. Think of the Higgs Boson Particle as a big old ice cube. I'm going to chop at some of the edges ... with a toothpick.

What is a Higgs Boson Particle exhibit doing in an Edinburgh museum? The connection is Higgs, as in Peter Higgs from the University of Edinburgh who theorized the Higgs Boson Field in 1964. The field is what the Higgs Boson Particle sits on, like a soccer ball sits on a soccer field.

If Higgs came from Edinburgh, where did Boson come from, smarty pants? Oh crap. I looked this up, and Boson is a thing not a person. The boson is the particle. So saying the Higgs Boson Particle is already redundant, like "ATM Machine." But since editing this blog post is a PITA, let's just pretend I didn't make that mistake.

What exactly is a Higgs Boson? It's a particle. Pay attention! And by a particle, I mean it's really, really small. You know what an atom is, right? A Higgs Boson is one of the 17 elementary particles that make up atoms, and they can't be cut down into any smaller pieces.

Yeah, but when I was a kid, they said you couldn't cut atoms into smaller pieces. What's up with that? Oh for crying out loud. The "atoms are the smallest thing in the universe" was an easy way to stop your incessant questioning. Like Santa Claus. You don't still believe in him, do you?

That's a little earth shattering. Hmmm. Can I take some time to sit with that? No worries. Dum de dum. Do de do.

OK, I'm back. Let's say I have a bunch of Higgs Bosons on my carpet. Can I just vacuum them up? A Higgs Boson is smaller than your vacuum cleaner hose and all atoms are made up of them, so ... I would say "yes". You have to be really quick about it though. A Higgs Boson lasts .000000000000000016 seconds before decaying into other particles. Better practice your eye-hand coordination there, pardner. Try playing more Whack a Mole. I know just the place...

If that tiny little particle has so much energy, and I have literally gazillions of these in my body, why can't I drag my tired ass out of bed? I think this question is best answered with another question. How much did you drink last night? Don't lie to me. I can call your buddies at the pub.

Why do I need such a big thing as a particle accelerator to detect such a little thing like a Higgs Boson? Good one. Particle accelerators take up multiple city blocks and lots of energy. The one at Cornell (an older one) sits under the soccer field and sucks up 25% of the campus's power. The large Hadron Collider at CERN has tunnels that go for 17 miles. You need a lot of room and a lot of energy to speed up the particles and slam them into each other. Do not stick your hand in that particle accelerator, muh friend!

Why is it called the God Particle? Oh, you're not going to like this one.

The beautifully deep and poetic moniker "The God Particle" is actually short for the "The Goddamn Particle", a term coined by physicist Leon Lederman because the Higgs Boson was so elusive and difficult to detect. Unfortunately, Lederman couldn't get publishers to use "Goddamn" in the title of his book.

Still, the Higgs Boson is kind of special because of its association with the Higgs Field, which in turn gives mass to objects. To simplify it ridiculously, the Higgs Boson makes things "real". That's kind of Goddish, right? Higgs himself theorized that the Higgs Field was there before the universe was created, but was in an unstable state that couldn't hold actual matter.

Gah. Here's where I could use a big fat doobie to understand this stuff.

So there are 17 particles in Quantum Physics, and the Higgs Boson is the last one to be "discovered". How do we know there's not an 18th one out there? We don't. But in the 1960's, quantum theorists thought there were over 150 different particles. Some of these turned out to be just different versions of each other. So the number of known particles is going down not up. If you're playing this like Vegas odds (and why the hell not?), you're going to want to stand here.

What does Schrödinger's Cat think about the Higgs Boson? Oh he's down with it. And not down with it. Simultaneously.

But What Does it All Mean?

Diddly squat. Or at least, as close to diddly squat as you can get.

Everybody's talking about the Dunning-Kruger Effect nowadays. You get a little knowledge in some area, and immediately you overestimate your abilities in that area. Only after you study and study and study ... do you realize how little you know. Thus the Shakespearean maxim, "A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool." Or more succinctly, "A little knowledge is dangerous."

The Internet seems to multiply the aggregate Dunning-Kruger Effect of society. Its pint-size distillations are easy to swallow, but they are far removed from the vast barley fields of truth. If I've learned nothing in Scotland, it's that everything can be reduced to a whisky metaphor.

So I can respect an honest 10 year old, looking at a big chunk of the CERN particle accelerator in the National Museum of Scotland, saying, "I don't know."

I don't know either. But I can still smoke his ass in the turn-the-crank-and-light-up-the-light-bulbs exhibit. Ha ha.