Road Apples by Tim Sanders
July 9, 2012

Brave new world

Share |

I like science, when I can understand it. But here are a couple of scientific news items which gave me problems.


1. HIGGS FINDINGS:


Last week when I heard that the Higgs bos’n had been found, I was glad. I didn’t know what kind of ship the Higgs was, but I assumed there’d been some sort of a maritime accident. And anytime a boat full of men recovers a lost seaman, I share their joy.

Of course I had the story all wrong. The Higgs bos’n was actually the Higgs “boson,” which is a subatomic particle. According to some physicists, the Higgs boson is also known as the “God particle” because it is what holds the universe together. Scientists have been looking for it for several decades. Don’t ask me to explain this; I’m no scientist. I always thought duct tape was what held the universe together.

My son David, who is much smarter than I am due to the fact that we did not force him to eat broccoli when he was a child, tried to explain what he knew about atoms, physics and the God particle to me, but it was useless. My ears began to bleed, and I asked him to please leave the room before I blew a fuse. I had managed to put the whole Higgs boson/God particle discussion out of my mind, and my brain had finally cooled off when I got an e-mail from my friend Jim Pleger. Jim’s wife worked on Project Atlas at the University of Michigan. In his e-mail he explained that the Project Atlas team designed the outer ring for something called the CERN super hadron collider, which is a huge particle accelerator in Geneva that ... uh, accelerates particles. Jim’s wife, Xiaoyan, is also smarter than I am, but it probably has nothing to do with broccoli. This new outer ring super hadron collider information gave me a headache, but also convinced me I needed to read up on subatomic particles. So I did, sort of. And I will be glad to pass along everything I know about them now:


• Atoms are even smaller than molecules. Everything is composed of atoms. Your computer, for example, is composed of tiny Dell atoms. Unless it is a Hewlett-Packard or a Mac. Atoms used to be the smallest things in rhe universe, until some busybody discovered subatomic particles.


• You cannot see atoms, which are way bigger than subatomic particles, which you can also not see. Nobody can see them, but we all know they are there because of particle physics, which is a branch of physics developed by particle scientists. Amazingly enough, while you can’t see an atom, you can split one. This results in a large, devastating explosion which you can see, and which can destroy an entire city. I believe the size of the explosion depends on the size of the atom you’re splitting, but I’m not sure. The process of splitting the atom is called nuclear fission. Or maybe it’s nuclear fusion, I forget.


• Albert Einstein knew all about atoms and subatomic particles. Without Einstein there would be no atomic bombs, atomic energy, atomic clocks, atomic numbers, the Atomic Café franchises in Marblehead and Beverly, Massachusetts, or the popular urban atomic wedgie. Einstein was the smartest physicist who ever lived. Then again, he often forgot to tie his own shoes, and left his home in Princeton without his pants.


• If you majored in English Literature in college, or are otherwise mentally challenged, you will never understand how it is that there is a whole field of scientific study based on things nobody has ever seen. And even simplified explanations will make no sense. Consider the following actual Wikipedia atomic particle quote:


“The elementary particles of the Standard Model include:

• Six “flavors” of quarks: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm

• Six types of leptons: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino

• Thirteen gauge bosons (force carriers): the graviton of gravity, the photon of electromagnetism, the three W and Z bosons of the weak force, and the eight gluons of the strong force.”


Helpful? HAH! If you try to make sense out of all that gobbledygook, may the eight gluons of the strong force be with you.


• Nobody has ever seen an atom, and nobody has ever seen a subatomic particle, let alone electrons, neutrinos, tau neutrinos, photons of elctromagnetism, or the three bosons of the weak force, or gluons. And, flavor or no flavor, nobody has ever tasted a quark. My conclusion: somebody’s pulling somebody’s leg. And this guy Higgs, the one who lost his boson, was only a screenwriter for a B science fiction movie company.


2. THE THING WITH FEATHERS:


In a July 2 National Geographic News article, Christine Dell’Amore wrote:
“A newfound squirrel-tailed specimen is the most primitive meat-eating dinosaur with feathers, according to a new study. The late Jurassic discovery, study authors say, challenges the image of dinosaurs as ‘overgrown lizards.’

Unearthed recently from a Bavarian limestone quarry, the ‘exquisitely preserved’ 150-million-year-old fossil has been dubbed sciurumimus albersdoerferi–‘Scirius’ being the scientific name for tree squirrels.”


• Unlike the particle physicists, at least these paleontologists have something they can actually see to base their science on. How they can tell the difference between a 150-million-year-old fossil, a 5-million-year-old fossil, and one that just came out of the oven last week, is beyond me. And why they didn’t classify this one as one of the three Jurassic squirrel-tailed W and Z bosons of the weak force, is beyond me, too.

• And by the way, Alley Oop’s dinosaur, Dinny, did not have feathers. I have proof in the form of an old 10-cent comic book stored downstairs in a box, somewhere. Unlike those subatomic particles, you can actually see it. And unlike that bogus feathery squirrel fossil, it has a specific date on it–1955.