Friday, July 06, 2012

A mighty particle is their god.


http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=m3-4Ez7Kc-o

I am the gray beatnik in the video who forgot the poem he wrote. I wrote it 15 years ago while reading Leon Lederman's book The God Particle. This video was made Monday, two days before the official announcement, although there were some news items about it. I'm sure if they asked the question Thursday they would have got more informed answers. Maybe.
The young hipsters who shot the video said I was the first one they asked who knew anything about the H-B. I said a little more, but it didn't make the cut. Its much funnier that I forgot the poem, which is pretty mediocre.

Two relevant fragments from a "forgotten poem:"

Consider the physicist/shaman in his high-tech medicine wheel, the particle accelerator. 
He is looking for the God Particle, the ultimate, indivisible element of the Universe.
He observes data compiled from infinitesimally small collisions he arranges in his atom-smasher.
This medicine man's mind, itself a microcosmos of electrical events, ponders the paradoxes of electromagnetism.
Does his brain perceive patterns that are in the data, or do these patterns belong to the structure of the brain?

The nervous system with which you conceive the Universe is the same nervous system with which the Universe conceives you.

(1998)

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