Vic Socotra

13 October 2009

The Higgs Boson

(The Higgs Boson, in Plush Fabric)

Time moves backward in Ohio. I know that for a fact, since I saw it Sunday morning behind the wheel of the Bluesmobile.

In theory, this is a simple thing. Einstein laid the thing out; as old Police Cruisers approach the speed of light on the Ohio Turnpike, the passage of time will slow, eventually coming to a halt. Then, the odometer will begin to actually move backwards.

In my experience, this phenomenon manifests itself shortly after the Commodore Perry Rest Plaza, and can actually continue almost all the way to the big bridge over the Cuyahoga River.

Professional Physicists have known this for years; as you are doubtless aware, they ditched our conventional view of time some years ago and live in a universe of strings and parallel realities.

As the odometer began to move backward I felt the familiar Ohio Fugue State, first anticipated by the renowned Niels Bohr. On an early auto trip from Princeton to the Manhattan Project labs at Los Alamos in New Mexico the Physicist postulated that conventional time and speed do not exist except as imagined by the Ohio State Patrol.

He was quite right, of course.

Once liberated from ordinary time, it is perfectly possible to range back and forth in the temporal continuum. I had breached the barrier of time on Wednesday, and blissfully free of it I ranged thirty years or more into the future with my folks, who were, in this reality, impossibly old.

Leaving them in the little City by the Bay, the mechanism of the massive Crown Victoria Police Interceptor freed me from the future and allowed me to drift into the past, arriving there at an arbitrary “assigned” time in the afternoon in suburban Detroit, in a place called Troy, known as The City of Tomorrow, Today.

There was a time-traveling event there, enabling me to effortlessly transition from the gray future to the sepia past.

The occasion was the celebration of the 40th complete orbit of the Earth around the solar disc since the Fifth Dimension had their number one hit, “Aquarius,” and our cohort was forcibly evicted from the safely of High School.

Of the six hundred odd variables in our class- and trust me, a physicist could have dined out for years on our collective eccentricities, more than a hundred were intended to turn out to celebrate the inevitable triumph of entropy.

It was a propitious time for the gathering, a round number, and with the end of the world scheduled for 2012, probably the last time we will be able to schedule anything with any certainty.

Drifting unhinged in time through the lobby, I realized that the Large Hadron Collider is going to be restarted in just a few weeks.

I had briefly been concerned about the original start-up of the thing. As physics buffs, I know you were, too.

The US Government had considered building a gigantic proton-smasher, but in an uncharacteristic flinch about the mismanagement of public funds, abandoned the project to allow the Europeans to engage in the folly at an amazing facility near Geneva, Switzerland.

There was some talk last year that operation of the hyperspeed racetrack would actually tear a hole in the fabric of time and space, and possibly suck all the Swiss right into it as if the Universe were actually a cheese wheel. What actually happened was that during the initial steering of the proton beams, the operation caused two superconducting bending magnets to fail.

The discussion at the time was that the welding was shoddy. It has taken a year to get everything up to spec, and some lower-speed trials will be conducted prior to the Holidays in preparation to begin the search for the elusive Higgs Boson.

As you know, the Higgs Boson is the only Standard Model sub-atomic particle that has yet to be observed by scientists, and validation of its existence will go a long way to understanding the Mind of God, not to mention the origin of mass in the universe.

More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon, which mediates electromagnetism, and the massive W and Z bosons, which mediate the universal weak force, which is analogous to my will power.

This issue has been keeping some of us awake. Recently, another theory has arisen, a sort of unifying field theory. What actually is at work is that the troubled Hadron Collider is being bombarded by particles from the Future, which are seeking to keep it from finding the Higgs Boson.

The key to this theory is that the Higgs Boson is not supposed to be here in the universe that we know, and time travel is at work to sabotage the creation of the pesky little particles.

It is a variation on the classic conundrum about going back in time to kill your grandparents. Couldn’t happen, since if it had happened, you would not have existed to do it.

In this version, scientists believe that it may be possible to go back in time to pull your grandfather back from toppling into the Grand Canyon, and that is what is happening now.

Things from the future are sabotaging the Hadron Collider.

I don’t know if they will be successful. Full speed trials are supposed to resume in January. Just because one Grandfather was saved doesn’t mean they all will be, and it is equally well known that the Mayan Long Calendar ends in 2012.

So, I guess the deal is that many of the people at the reunion actually are grandparents already, even if they look suspiciously like very young people.

At least if you squint hard enough.

It is all perfectly reasonable, and demonstrates that if we can travel forward in time, we may, at least temporarily, be able to go backward.

But we will have to get to that tomorrow.

Close Window