TV promo for "Forbidden Planet"

It is amazing what the Internet has socked away. Here is a promo for Forbidden Planet probably made for TV and hosted by Walter Pidgeon and a lot of screen time with Robbie robot.

Say it isn't so...Nessy gone?

"Loch Ness Monster sightings decline. Time to panic?"

2013 was the first year in 90 years in which there were no sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, prompting some to worry that the venerable cryptid has packed up and left.

by

Benjamin Radford

February 10th, 2014

The Christian Science Monitor

A veteran custodian of Loch Ness monster sightings is concerned that Nessie has not been seen in well over a year, and may be gone, according to a news report. This is the first time in nearly 90 years that such a lengthy lag in sightings has occurred.

Gary Campbell, who lives in Inverness in the United Kingdom has been keeping records of Loch Ness monster sightings for the past 17 years and has put together a list of sightings that goes back some 1,500 years, according to the BBC News. 

"It's very upsetting news and we don't know where she's gone," BBC News quoted Campbell as saying. "The number of sightings has been reducing since the turn of the century but this is the first time in almost 90 years that Nessie wasn't seen at all." (Apparently three reports of possible Nessie sightings in 2013 were discredited after closer scrutiny, The Inverness Courier reported.)

This is not the first time Nessie has been a no show; in fact, there are no reports of the beast until less than a century ago. The Loch Ness monster first achieved notoriety in 1933 after a story was published in a local newspaper describing not a monstrous head or hump but instead a splashing in the water that appeared to be caused "by two ducks fighting." A famous photograph showing a mysterious head and neck brought Nessie international fame, but was revealed to be hoax decades later.

Some claim that the Loch Ness monster was first reported in A.D. 565, when St. Columba turned away a giant beast threatening a man in the Ness River, which flows into the lake. However it is only one of many Catholic Church legends about righteous saints vanquishing Satan in the form of serpents and dragons.

There are many myths lurking in the cold Scottish highlands, including legends of "water horses" — creatures associated with rivers and lakes that resemble normal horses, but are actually both magical and deadly: Should anyone try to mount a water horse, it will accept the rider, then gallop to a nearby lake or river, drown its rider, then eat his flesh, one myth goes. Though some of these legends and stories may have inspired some of the claims about the Loch Ness monster, Nessie is, of course, not a magical horse, but instead believed to be a very real, living and breathing aquatic creature resembling a long-necked dinosaur.

Skeptics would suggest there is likely no monster in the lake at all. But this news about the lack of sightings poses a big problem for those who believe in the creature's existence. The fact that no Nessie report has been registered in 18 months means that, even if it existed, it is likely no longer there.

Though people often speak of Nessie as a solitary (often female) animal, if it exists there must be more than one in the lake — at least dozens if not hundreds. This changes the equation and deepens the mystery, because with so many of them allegedly living in the lake they should be seen much more often. It defies logic to believe a group of unknown monsters lives in the lake — which has many local residents and tens of thousands of monster-seeking tourists all around it — and not a single one surfaces to be seen. Think of it this way: If over a year went by without a single sighing of a giraffe, rhino or horse, the most logical — and the most tragic — explanation would be that they had all died out. Extinction is the only reason that large animals simply vanish like that.

This is especially true for the Nessie creatures, which are, after all, confined to a lake that is only a little over 20 miles long and about a mile wide (32 by 1.6 kilometers) for much of its length. Unlike birds (which can migrate hundreds or thousands of miles) or terrestrial animals (which may roam for a few hundred miles), the Nessie creatures are presumably locked in the lake. There are no underground waterway exits to the ocean or anywhere else. In short, there is nowhere else to go if they are not being seen in the lake.

But fear not, monster lovers and Inverness Tourism Board: If history is any indication, eventually there will be more sightings of Nessie, whether they exist or not. There are enough things in the lake that can be mistaken for a monster, including large fish, strange waves, and even the occasional hoax, to keep the sightings going and the tourist dollars coming.

Premature death notice...Jade Rabbit lives

"China's Jade Rabbit rover comes 'back to life': Xinhua"
 
February 13th, 2014

SPACE DAILY

 China's troubled Jade Rabbit lunar rover has survived a bitterly cold 14-day lunar night, officials said Thursday, prompting hopes it can be repaired after suffering a malfunction last month.

The problem was a setback for Beijing's ambitious military-run space programme, which includes plans for a permanent orbiting station by 2020 and eventually sending a human to the moon.

"The rover stands a chance of being saved as it is still alive," Pei Zhaoyu, spokesman for China's lunar probe programme told the official news agency Xinhua.

An earlier report by the semi-official China News Service said an attempt to restore the vehicle to full functionality on Monday had been unsuccessful.

The rover, named Yutu or Jade Rabbit after the pet of Chang'e, the goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology, experienced a "mechanical control abnormality" as the lunar night fell on January 25, provoking an outpouring of sympathy from Chinese Internet users.

But Pei said: "Yutu has come back to life!", adding that the rover "went into sleep under an abnormal status".

Scientists had been concerned it might not be able to survive the extremely low temperatures of the lunar night, when it was supposed to remain dormant, but it was now receiving signals normally, Xinhua cited him as saying.

But experts were still working to establish the causes of its mechanical control abnormality, the agency reported, without giving details.

Australia-based independent space expert Morris Jones told AFP that the problem involved a solar panel on the rover failing to close.

"This allowed heat to escape from the rover in the cold lunar night. The cold has probably damaged some parts of the rover permanently, but it seems that some parts are still working," he said.

Beijing sees the space programme as a symbol of China's rising global stature and technological advancement, as well as the Communist Party's success in reversing the fortunes of the once-impoverished nation.

The Jade Rabbit was deployed on the moon's surface on December 15, several hours after the Chang'e-3 probe landed.

The landing -- the third such soft-landing in history, and the first of its kind since the Soviet Union's mission nearly four decades ago -- was a huge source of pride in China, where millions across the country charted the rover's accomplishments.

An unverified Weibo user "Jade Rabbit Lunar Rover", which has posted first-person accounts in the voice of the probe, on Thursday made its first update since January.

"Hi, anybody there?" it said, prompting thousands of comments within minutes.

Xinhua has said the account is "believed to belong to space enthusiasts who have been following Yutu's journey to the moon".

In a previous online posting following the "abnormality", it said: "The sun here has fallen, and the temperature is dropping fast. I've said a lot today, but I still feel it's not enough.

"I'll tell everyone a little secret. I'm actually not that sad. I'm just in my own adventure story, and like any protagonist, I encountered a bit of a problem. Goodnight, Earth. Goodnight, humans."
More than 6,000 Internet users wrote messages in response, many of them expressing hope that the rover has not seen its last day.

"We'll always remember that you're watching us on the moon," wrote one Web user. "One day, we'll bring you home."

China first sent an astronaut into space a decade ago and is the third country to carry out a lunar rover mission after the United States and the former Soviet Union.

The central government has said the latest mission was "a milestone in the development of China's aerospace industry under the leadership of... Comrade Xi Jinping".

Deceased--Yutu

Deceased--Yutu

"Farewell to Yutu"

by

Morris Jones

February 12th, 2014

SPACE DAILY

 By now, it seems almost certain that China's Yutu Moon rover has died a premature death in the cold lunar night. The rover has been exposed to sunlight for a few days, and there has been no word of it waking up.

Yutu was carried to the Moon aboard China's Chang'e-3 Moon lander, a boxy structure reminiscent of the base of an Apollo lunar lander from the 1960s. Chang'e-3 made history by becoming China's first mission to land on the Moon, and the first object to softly land there in more than three decades.

Yutu's problems began roughly three weeks ago when a solar panel failed to fold inwards over the rover's body, just before night fell at the rover's landing site. The folding panel was designed to protect the rover's interior during the two-week lunar night, by trapping heat from a radioisotope source. Without this protection, the rover's electronics have apparently frozen.

China had originally expected Yutu to function for roughly three months. The failure of Yutu after less than a month of nominal surface operations is a disappointment.

Apart from mourning its loss, the major priority for China's space program will be conducting a post-mortem for Yutu. It is vital to know how it malfunctioned. Fortunately, there seems to be a lot of data that was obtained before night fell.

We know that the solar panel did not close. We can easily deduce how this affected the thermal protection for the rover. Much work will need to be performed to work out exactly why this mechanical failure occurred in the first place.

Moving parts are always tricky for spacecraft. Getting them to work on the Moon is even more difficult. Apart from the vicious cycles of heat and cold, there is the ever present problem of dust. We do not know if the hinges were jammed by dust, or if there was a failure of the motors or mechanisms designed to close the panel for some other reason. Lubricant could have been worn away from some part, causing friction or even a "cold welding" of metal surfaces in a vacuum. China will probably be conducting simulations to determine the most likely cause.

With Yutu's case file certain to close in the near future, it will be time to consider the fate of China's next Moon mission. China has already built a back-up lander, dubbed Chang'e-4, which it planned to launch in a few years. This is a typical strategy of China's lunar exploration program: Two identical spacecraft are built in case one fails.

China's first lunar mission, Chang'e-1, was launched to orbit the Moon in 2007. The mission was a complete success. Thus, China decided that its back-up spacecraft, Chang'e-2, would not precisely repeat its predecessor's mission. It was launched in 2010 with a more powerful rocket that helped the spacecraft to save its fuel reserves. Chang'e-2 was sent on a shorter mission to the Moon and then flown into deep space to fly past the asteroid Toutatis.

This time, China will probably need to use the back-up lander to repeat the tasks that Chang'e-3 failed to complete. There will probably be an overview of the design of some of its most critical components, to strengthen them against failure.

This analyst expects that China will want to land a second rover with this mission, but we can expect that it will be thoroughly overhauled. China will want to ensure that the solar panel will not fail again, and will probably look for other potential problems. The next rover will probably look the same as Yutu but it will be improved.

Exactly when Chang'e-4 will launch is unclear. The problems experienced by this latest mission suggest that China will want to take a fair amount of time for troubleshooting, redesign and testing. Any previous speculation on the approximate launch time is probably no longer reliable.

We will need to wait for China to advertise a new launch timetable. In turn, this could affect the fate of the two lunar landers that are expected to come after Chang'e-4. These missions, dubbed Chang'e-5 and 6, are sample-return missions. It could take longer to launch them, and their design could be revised in the wake of the Yutu investigations.

Whatever China does with its second rover, one change should be suggested. The rover needs a new name. China should remember that saying "Yutu 2" in English sounds stranger than it does in Chinese!

"That's All Folks"...analog at movie theaters is nearly dead

"The Last 35 mm Picture Show"

A small-town Saskatchewan cinema goes digital

by

Vanda Schmöckel

January/February 2014

The Walrus

Woody Woodpecker and Sugarfoot were minding their own business when Dirty McNasty came along and ruined their day. The gun-wielding horse thief stole away with Sugarfoot, leaving Woody alone without a ride on the outskirts of town. Saddle-Sore Woody is hardly a tear-jerker, but this screening in early September still feels emotional for Charity Taylor, the thirty-eight-year-old projectionist at the Nite Hawk Theatre in Indian Head, Saskatchewan. “It’s been a tough month,” she says.

The 1964 animated short is likely the last 35 mm film she will ever run through the ancient projector, whose twin stands idle nearby in the twelve-by-twelve-foot insulated projection booth. The two machines, vintage 1930s, usually work in tandem. Because the cartoon is just six minutes, she does not listen for the bell that would otherwise signal a switch that must be perfectly timed. A full-length feature can entail seven or more 2,000-foot reels and plenty of grunt work—splicing, rewinding, and lifting the heavy spools onto sturdy old spindles—but she will miss it.

Tonight is part of a community effort to save Indian Head’s 109-year-old opera house turned movie theatre, and to replace its carbon arc projection system with a digital one. The owners are ready to retire and cannot justify investing in the technology; they ended regular shows on August 25. They want the 240-seat venue to endure, but whoever reopens it will need a $62,000 down payment on top of $45,000 to upgrade the projector—a tall order.

Indian Head, population 1,815, sits forty-five minutes east of Regina. Motorists speeding along the Trans-Canada Highway might recognize its grain elevator from Little Mosque on the Prairie, which was filmed here, but they have little reason to stop. Life was different in 1904, when the town boasted one of the first opera houses west of Winnipeg. Back then, it presented everything from chamber music and The Pirates of Penzance to the Chautauqua circuit.

The Nite Hawk’s mid-century maroon velveteen seats, salvaged from a demolished cinema in Regina, arrived in the ’90s. Beyond that, little money has been spent on renovations over the years. The balcony and the dance floor are long gone, but the original stage remains, as well as remnants of a pyrotechnic prop from a production of Faust during the theatre’s inaugural season. The non-profit group behind the fundraising campaign consists of local business owners and arts enthusiasts from the city. They hope to add a performance space for drama and music, a fitting return to the past and a renewed reason for those passing through to stop here.

Some of the theatre’s structural history has survived by chance. Nonetheless, Taylor, who spends her days down the street at Film Rescue International, a specialty processor of discontinued stock, understands that film requires more effort. Clients from around the world send in 35 mm negatives and Super 8 and 16 mm reels, then she and six co-workers resurrect the images of lost loved ones and long-ago vacations. “There aren’t too many jobs like this in small towns,” she says, laughing.

Taylor appreciates the irony of restoring film by day even as her nights projecting it are numbered. Meanwhile, conservation on a larger scale takes place some 3,000 kilometres away, at the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles. The specialized repository has 350,000 titles, with some reels dating back to the 1890s, but UCLA also struggles with the transition to digital cinema packages. “I don’t have $80,000 to $100,000 for a DCP set-up,” explains Jan-Christopher Horak, the FTA’s director. Under the right conditions, film can last over a century, but digital movies have no archival equivalent. The band-aid solution is continual migration, backing up files every few years. “Digital is still too ephemeral,” Horak explains, “so we preserve new movies on film. The studios don’t say so, but even they make 35 mm separation negative masters of CGI productions.”

Preservation aside, the switch to digital is almost complete. Hollywood has wound down print distribution, and insiders expect it will stop altogether in the next year or two. Instead of celluloid strips clattering past a beam of light, an algorithm now translates zeros and ones stored on compact hard drives into peerless images, at twenty-four frames per second.

Digital projection took off slowly, with little pressure to switch until the latest wave of 3-D films. Many people point to James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) as the technology’s vanguard, but Disney’s Chicken Little (2005) was actually the first movie projected digitally in 3-D. Gimmicks and funny glasses aside, DCP set-ups enable small-town cinemas to screen new releases sooner than when bulky canisters rolled into town by bus, often weeks after the films inside had premiered in cities. In the end, DCP might be the last line of defence against Netflix, iTunes, and home theatre.

The sky has not yet fallen on the Nite Hawk, and tonight’s fundraiser has brought the down payment within reach. While the smell of popcorn drifts through the long, narrow lobby, the high school football team sells 50/50 tickets, and Regina musicians Rah Rah and Andy Shauf prepare to go onstage. Upstairs, Taylor monitors the carbon rods that burn down like cigarettes inside the old lamp house, as Woody outsmarts McNasty and reunites with Sugarfoot.

Even if Indian Head manages to revive the Nite Hawk, Taylor is out of a job; a new plug-and-play system would be as simple to operate as a TV remote. “I’m not sure how digital works or if you need a projectionist,” she says, switching off the lamp and the speakers one last time. “I’m just glad I was able to do this before it was too late.” As the first band takes the stage and the music starts, she heads down to join the party.

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Heretofore unpublished Einstein paper [1931] and commentary

 Abstract...

We present a translation and analysis of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he proposed a 'steady-state' model of the universe. The manuscript appears to have been written in early 1931 and demonstrates that Einstein once considered a cosmic model in which the mean density of matter in an expanding universe remains constant due to a continuous creation of matter from empty space, a process he associated with the cosmological constant. This model is in marked contrast to previously known Einsteinian models of the cosmos (both static and dynamic) but anticipates the well-known steady-state theories of Hoyle, Bondi and Gold. We find that Einstein’s steady-state model contains a fundamental flaw and suggest it was discarded for this reason. We also suggest that he declined to try again because he found more sophisticated versions rather contrived. The manuscript is of historical significance because it reveals that Einstein debated between steady-state and evolving models of the cosmos decades before a similar debate took place in the cosmological community.

"Einstein’s steady-state model of the universe" by Cormac O’Raifeartaigh, Brendan McCann, Werner Nahm and Simon Mitton

Thoughts on the "God Particle"...a dated essay

"The physics and poetics of the search for the God particle"

by

John Olson

Winter 2010

American Scholar

I don’t remember a time of greater insecurity. University of Massachusetts economics professor Richard Wolff argues that government bailouts and stimulus packages will not be enough to address the real causes of the economic crisis or to mend the “seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself.” While Wall Street has been re-floated with staggering amounts of capital, the rest of the country remains floundering on a dry, mud-caked riverbed. “The bailout package,” observed Joseph Stiglitz in a January 2009 Vanity Fair essay appropriately titled “Capitalist Fools,” “was like a massive transfusion to a patient suffering from internal bleeding—and nothing was being done about the source of the problem, namely all those foreclosures.” Climate change is wreaking havoc on the world’s population; Australia, Argentina, India, Kenya, and war-torn Afghanistan are suffering unprecedented droughts; polar ice caps are melting at a much faster rate than scientists predicted; typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods have increased in fury and devastation; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050 if food production doesn’t rise by at least 70 percent; and a series of wildfires has left California, which is drought stricken and near bankruptcy, as black as a handful of charcoal briquettes. Violence seems to be on the rise across the globe, from militants in Afghanistan spraying acid on the faces of girls walking to school, to the Mumbai attacks, to burning cars in France, to drug-related killings in Mexico, to an increase in domestic violence in the United States.

Planet Earth is in a traumatic turmoil. The combined services of Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the Incredible Hulk could not put a dent in the problem. Anything added to this hellishness would seem to be lost in redundancy, but not so: one more item of astonishing freakishness is causing anxiety from a complex in Switzerland known as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where something called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been sputtering into operation. Its purpose is to discover whether a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson (or the God particle) actually exists. There is a far-fetched yet widespread apprehension that a black hole created there could swallow the planet. Indeed, the entire universe.

At present, the world, including Switzerland, is still here. But that’s because the $9 billion machine located outside Geneva has been riddled with problems and delays. In September 2008, a beam of protons was successfully circulated in stages through the vast ring of superconducting magnets housed in the collider’s 17-mile-long tunnel, three kilometers at a time. A few days later, a quench (an abnormal termination of magnet operation) occurred, causing a loss of approximately six tons of the liquid helium needed to keep the collider cooled. Later analysis revealed the problem to be bad electrical connections. A total of 53 magnets were damaged in the incident. The machine has been beset by problems of a less technical nature as well. In October, in a scenario more redolent of a James Bond spy adventure, French investigators charged a physicist working at the LHC with having links to al-Qaeda. One begins to wonder if all these delays and complications aren’t owing to a more preordained cause. A pair of CERN physicists have somewhat whimsically suggested that the reason for building the collider might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make a Higgs boson. In late October, BBC News announced that engineers working on the LHC had successfully injected beams of particles into two sections of the vast machine. The experiment itself, which will involve a collision of two beams, one running in a clockwise direction, the other running counterclockwise, is scheduled for December 2009. If you happen to be reading this article past that date, it would be safe to assume that a particle with less mass than a second-generation quark has not swallowed our planet.

Not yet, anyway.

So what exactly is all this apprehension about, and how real is it? Predictions that the collision of subatomic particles at the LHC might create a black hole and consume our planet, if not the entire universe, owe more to hysteria than to science. Black holes are created by the gravitational collapse of supermassive stars, which are rare and trillions of times the mass of Earth. If a black hole were created at CERN, it would be so tiny that it would eradicate itself instantly.

Thus, fears of creating a black hole are easily dismissed. But fear has a way of expanding and exacerbating worst-case scenarios. Anxiety is exponential. Problems interact to compound into an ever-broadening chain of unlooked-for consequences. There has also been some speculation that a peculiar set of entities called strangelets could turn our world inside out and make it look like a fun house gone completely mad. A strangelet is a hypothetical object composed of a finite number of roughly equal “up, down, and strange quarks.” This anxiety, however improbable, is not entirely void of validity or charm. A strangelet, coming into contact with the familiar world, could convert ordinary matter into strange matter. As much as the current political milieu feels like some form of bizarre, parallel dimension where very little makes sense, the familiar world of nasturtiums, yo-yos, and lifeguards is still emphatically present. What would a world composed of “up, down, and strange quarks” gone awry be like? Would everything be neatly reversed? Would up be down and down be up? Would backward go forward and forward go backward? Would tomorrow happen yesterday and yesterday happen tomorrow?

This is heady stuff. My understanding of quarks and relativity is pretty limited. My preferred domain is that of poetry, not physics. Physicists tend to get irritated when poets attempt to turn mathematical formulations into metaphors. Nevertheless, the two domains share a similar appetite for knowledge: Why are we here? How does something come from nothing? How did the universe begin? Is there a supreme intelligence behind creation?

Physicists may be ill at ease when writers distort their precise mathematical constructions to illustrate a facet of metaphysical thought, but physicists themselves borrow heavily from literature. Murray Gell-Mann borrowed the word quark from James Joyce to name an elementary particle (the quark is one of two basic constituents of matter, the other being the lepton). But the poetry doesn’t stop there. There are six different types of quarks, and physicists have chosen to describe them as flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. This isn’t just poetry; this is enchantment.

What intrigues me the most about the current state of physics isn’t this strange sortie into the realm of literature to find language for its formulations, but the quest itself for the fundamental nature of reality. How does one go about finding a solution to a metaphysical problem using empirical methods and expensive machinery? Wouldn’t such methods be inherently flawed, doomed to flail about in blind alleys and dead ends, another huge waste of public funds and other resources? Did the universe pop out of a proton? Can God be discovered in a quark?

The Large Hadron Collider consists of 38,000 tons of equipment located approximately 300 feet below the earth. The complex lies about 10 miles west of Geneva. Portions of the tunnel pass under the Jura Mountains of France. This is some of the most beautiful country in the world, filled with luxurious wildflower meadows, craggy cascades, pine forests, and mossy rock walls dripping with delicate ferns. It was near here in the rainy summer of 1816 that Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron watched electric storms rage above the rocky summits and discussed Erasmus Darwin’s galvanism experiments. Mary Shelley participated in these discussions, and she was especially intrigued by the prospect of reanimation. “Darwin . . . preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case,” she wrote, “till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.” These speculations, of course, culminated in her novel Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, one of the world’s first cautionary tales about the dangers of science unchecked by judicious or ethical concerns.

The goal of the Large Hadron Collider is no less Promethean than the ambitions of Victor Frankenstein: to find the God particle, a “massive scalar elementary particle” predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Its discovery would help to explain how otherwise massless elementary particles cause matter to have mass. That is to say, the Higgs boson is a noun with a long string of adjectives. Adjectives, it must be said, that contradict one another. How can a particle be massive? If a particle is elementary, how can it also be hypothetical? One feels as disoriented as if one were in the realm of surrealist poetry or the Zen koan.

Mass is not what it seems. This is because we inhabit a world of weight, density, texture, and tangibility. The realities produced by calculus and differential equations make no sense to us, literally. Our perceptions are keyed to specific sensations. Roughness, weightiness, smoothness, sharpness, dullness. Foods are sweet or bitter or a combination of the two. Some things are warm and dry, others cold and wet. We cannot conceive of a reality not immersed in such responses. Not without faith in numbers. Trajectories and orbital mechanics. Energy and force. Momentum and inertia. Some of these are available to our senses. We all know what velocity feels like. But when someone tells us that there is more space in an ingot of steel than there is steel, we balk at the truthfulness of such a statement. We might readily agree, based on what we have learned in science. But it still seems beyond the reach of imagining. Because if there is more space than steel in an ingot of steel, what does that say about us? Are we ghosts? Clouds of atoms? Symphonies of molecules? Waves of light and radiant heat? All improbable, all incredible revelations. But the fact remains: a three-ton ingot of steel is mostly space. If an atom were the size of a 14-story building, the nucleus would be a grain of salt in the middle of the seventh floor.

Two instances come to mind: Dr. Samuel Johnson dismissing George Berkeley’s ideas of immaterialism with his famous “I refute Berkeley thus,” and then kicking a rock; and Jack Kerouac’s address to an audience at the Hunter College Playhouse on November 6, 1958, during a symposium titled “Is There a Beat Generation?” It was there that Kerouac said, “We should be wondering tonight, ‘Is there a world?’ But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I’m walkin’ on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you’ll find out.”
Kerouac and Berkeley were right. Johnson’s rock was essentially phantasmal, a cloud of subatomic particles. He was kicking a dream.

Quarks and leptons are considered to be the fundamental particles that constitute all matter. A quark is an elementary fermion particle that interacts via the strong force. Leptons are a family of fundamental subatomic particles, comprised of the electron, the muon, and the tauon (or tau particle), as well as their associated neutrinos (electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino). Leptons are spin-½ particles, and as such are fermions. In contrast to quarks, Leptons do not strongly interact.

The problem with these definitions, which I wicked from Wikipedia, is their circularity: one definition leads to another question and then to another definition. It is good that Wikipedia’s definitions are hyperlinked, because the process of discovering what goes on in high-energy particle physics is unending. The result of these quests is a little knowledge, a tiny bit of insight, and a whole lot of dizziness and confusion.

All this becomes even more intriguing when one begins to question what is meant by particle. It is apparent that physicists are not referring to dust motes or grains of sand. Dust motes and sand do not have spin, probability waves, or flavors like up and down.

Or do they?

In the realm of particle physics, the word particle is a misnomer. What is actually being referred to is a probability pattern, an abstract mathematical quantity that is related to the probabilities of finding particles in various places and with various properties. A particle is never present at a definite place, nor is it absent. It occupies a realm of transcended opposites mathematically sandwiched between existence and nonexistence. One must learn to think outside the framework of classical logic.

Poets do this all the time. Charles Olson once referred to the poem as a “high energy construct.” Words, feathered and smashed together, produce piquant contradictions: black light, civil disobedience, urban cowboy, act naturally, crash landing, jumbo shrimp, hollow point. One can easily imagine a poem as a word accelerator. A broth of verbal hardware bouncing through metaphysical problems like thunderous hues of afternoon reverie.

However charming this tangent might be, the fact is the Large Hadron Collider is neither a quatrain nor a sonnet. It is 38,000 tons of superconducting dipole magnets, blow valves, sleeper screws, bellow chambers, control racks, helium pipes, gauges, bus bars, flow meters, pumps, storage tanks, electrical sensors, and cryogenic fluids. All to answer the question: How does energy acquire mass?

Physicists hope that this perplexing problem will be answered by the Higgs boson—by smashing protons together at a velocity within a millionth of a percent of the speed of light. In essence, they will be re-creating conditions as they existed at the beginning of time, when the universe was an undifferentiated soup of matter and radiation, particles colliding rapidly with one another in a temperature of inconceivable strength, 100,000 million degrees Kelvin, too hot to sip from a tablespoon. Which doesn’t really matter, as you would not be able to lift the spoon to your mouth: the mass density of the universe would be in the neighborhood of 3.8 thousand million kilograms per liter, or 3.8 thousand million times the density of water under normal terrestrial conditions.

If it exists, the Higgs boson will prove itself to be an essential and universal component of the material world. Hence, its nickname, God particle. The Higgs boson gives mass to other particles by causing them to cluster around it in much the same way a group of people may cluster around one another to hear a rumor or a bit of important news. Peter Higgs, for whom the particle is named, created a model in which particle masses arise from “fields” spread over space and time. In order to give particles mass, a background field (a Higgs field) is invented; it becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion—the clustering of the field around the particle—generates the particle’s mass. Once the particle has mass, it interacts with other elementary particles, slowing them down and giving them mass as well. On the other hand, the Higgs boson may turn out to be a neat mathematical trick, a form of quantum legerdemain, in which the rabbit and hat are nothing more than a vertiginous mass of numbers, much like the numbers that appear in the movie The Matrix when Neo finally penetrates the illusory nature of his world.

But what about that black hole? When the LHC does fire up again, is there still a chance we may all disappear into a black hole? Will a diluted public healthcare op­tion and a hyperinflated American dollar really matter? The answer may not be a flat-out absolute no (nothing in this universe is ever that certain), but it is ex­tremely unlikely. For an LHC-style black hole, estimated to be only a billionth of a billionth of a meter across, the black hole would exist for a bit more than a few billion-billion-billionths of a second. I think I’d rather be witness to those strangelets, rogue fragments of strange matter converting Earth to miracles of gold and beatitude, the dream of the alchemists proclaimed in ingots of joy. But this isn’t physics. It’s just simple effervescence.

If the Higgs boson is confirmed, it will explain how, but not why, things exist. What is left out is our creative response to the things of this world, this universe, this dimension. Aristotle referred to matter as “stuff.” Potential without actuality. It is essence that gives the potentiality of matter its ultimate design and purpose, its declamation and aspiration. Its character and value. Its genius, its gesture. The agitations that give it life. The intention behind it. Chopin, after all, is not just notes. Chopin is the glamour of yearning.

Each creative act we perform is a God particle. We are complicit in the creation of the universe. Matter without consciousness is raw ore. It is consciousness that smelts that ore into beams and bridges, enduring alloys that shine with an inner light.

What sort of laboratory would we need to fathom the mysteries of consciousness? How do we make sense of sense? Matter without thought is random matter, but thought without matter is as empty as a parking lot on Christmas Day. Our perceptions and memories give meaning to words, but the words themselves are representative of a higher order of being. They are the strange quarks of a giant quirk called Being.

Essence is an indissoluble kernel of inner principle, an inner grammar that gives shape and meaning to things. Anything in general, anything material, anything spiritual, anything living, is the product of a creative act on our part, our participation in its being. The discovery of a particle that allows energy to acquire mass is intrinsically exciting, but what it implies is staggering. What it implies is process. What it implies is a universe that is in a continuous state of becoming. Not just expanding, but flowering, blossoming, revealing its mysteries to the pollination of our curiosity. Our involvement with it is immense; we stand at the end of a wharf gazing at the immensity of the horizon, knowing, in our deepest self, that the horizon is within as well as without.

It is more than a little coincidental that the fall of our financial institutions and the illusory nature of our wealth were revealed at approximately the same time as the Large Hadron Collider came online. Money, like language, like up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charmed flavors of quark, is a result of interactions, not fully realized realities. As long as we deepen and honor our experiences in this world with an audacious creativity and push our language to its utmost limits of possibility, we will keep those black holes and bankruptcies at bay. Language extends our ability to exist not merely because it envelops us, but because it is always in a state of potentiality. Reality may prove to be a probability pattern, but without anyone to perceive and give it value, it remains a pattern. It does not become a ship, an avocado, or a hand. It does not awaken. It does not shine.

An object that is visible to us is there with or without us. It does not require our eyes and ears, the touch of our hands, the warmth of our bodies. But without these things, without this involvement, it remains what it is in its barest sense: space, time, and probability patterns. A tendency to exist. It isn’t so much that our involvement completes or fulfills its existence, but that we reciprocate its tendencies and so become more fully alive ourselves. And if that isn’t a particle of godliness, I don’t know what is.
[John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New and Selected Poems and Souls of Wind, a novel.]