It's Wednesday, isn't it? I think I'd better pack. Turned on the radio, coming back from the rendezvous with the school bus, and they were babbling on about the "elusive particle", the Higgs Boson. This, if I remember (and heard) rightly, is the entirely theoretical microscopic doohickey that has to exist if all the scientific theories about Creation (as in: there was a big explosion without any cause that we're prepared to acknowledge) are to be proved correct. They built the - what was it called? - Hadron Collider at CERN (don't know what it stands for) to find it, at a cost of several bank bail-outs.
It would be a kindness to let them find it, although the net result would only be that they know a little bit more about how the engine works - and still nothing about who's driving the vehicle. They're looking the wrong way, I think. They've got to the stage - this was the nub of today's radio item - where they're beginning to say that it will be an even better result if they don't find it. Hm. Until this point, the search for the Higgs Boson has resembled the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, remember? But I don't remember the "It will be even better if we don't find them" stage, do you?
If it was up to me, I'd arrange for a bunch of hard-line CERN enthusiasts to discover a choir of angels dancing on the head of a Higgs Boson, and a white-bearded old gentleman dressed in a sheet and standing on a cloud looking back up the microscope at them. Would they reveal that as though it was theirs to reveal? As a 'scientific' discovery? But it isn't up to me, so perhaps those angels could drop-kick their Higgs Boson back into the endless loop of scientific enquiry. Life responds to what we believe it to be - here's your Boson, sir. We thought you'd like it in blue.
Always a mistake to turn on the radio first thing. The door's closed today, and I'm disconnected from the air. It was raining a moment ago, soft sound on the roof, and I wish it would again. Perhaps I shall light the fire later.
It would be a kindness to let them find it, although the net result would only be that they know a little bit more about how the engine works - and still nothing about who's driving the vehicle. They're looking the wrong way, I think. They've got to the stage - this was the nub of today's radio item - where they're beginning to say that it will be an even better result if they don't find it. Hm. Until this point, the search for the Higgs Boson has resembled the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, remember? But I don't remember the "It will be even better if we don't find them" stage, do you?
If it was up to me, I'd arrange for a bunch of hard-line CERN enthusiasts to discover a choir of angels dancing on the head of a Higgs Boson, and a white-bearded old gentleman dressed in a sheet and standing on a cloud looking back up the microscope at them. Would they reveal that as though it was theirs to reveal? As a 'scientific' discovery? But it isn't up to me, so perhaps those angels could drop-kick their Higgs Boson back into the endless loop of scientific enquiry. Life responds to what we believe it to be - here's your Boson, sir. We thought you'd like it in blue.
Always a mistake to turn on the radio first thing. The door's closed today, and I'm disconnected from the air. It was raining a moment ago, soft sound on the roof, and I wish it would again. Perhaps I shall light the fire later.