The God Particle Sonata in D minor
Last winter physicists announced they had finally found what they had been looking for since Einstein predicted its existence: the God Particle. Now don’t get overly excited here — it’s a subatomic particle, not God Herself. Yesterday the atomic collider in Switzerland reversed itself. It was just a jiggle in the machine. These things happen, especially when you want like hell to find that God Particle.
Some of you laymen out there may not know the Uncertainty Principle. Most folks don’t. You may have even missed the original announcement of the discovery of the God Particle. We are a little busy here. The Kardashians alone could sponge up what little is left of our attention spans 24/7 and now there’s the Trump circus. Physics, especially quantum physics, well, it’s bound to take a backseat. Or get stuffed in the trunk.
But … since I have your attention briefly, the Uncertainty Principle states that there are no ‘proofs’ of theories that are valid. The very fact that the experimenter is watching the experiment changes the results in quantum physics. This is what Logicians refer to technically as a Major Bummer. Subatomic particles realize you’re peeking and then they behave differently. Doesn’t matter if the physicists cover their eyes with their hands, the quarks know. Beats me how, but they do.
I sometimes wonder if we live in a world that’s mostly what we think it is, that maybe there’s no real in reality, just a world of our imaginations. Course, that’s the artist in me hoping that’s the way the universe works, me pulling the strings, me creating the world, me making a music hopefully others can hear. Maybe the God Particle isn’t so much a proof, maybe it’s a music and we just haven’t learned yet how to hear it, much less hum the melody.
Stay tuned, is what I say. And try not to let the quarks know you’re paying attention.
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That is exactly what the Hindu and Buddhist sages have been telling us for millenia — we make it all happen, we only know a tiny fragment of a fragment of reality. Cool, huh.
Reading Ram Dass has been taking me back to my youth. I was not much of an experimenter with hallucinogens, but what make it all so attractive was seeing people who could be open to entirely different takes on reality without freaking out. I read a while back that hallucinogens like mescalin don’t actually change perception, they remove that part of consciousness that prevents us from seeing things that don’t fit in with our received understanding of reality — the things we cannot pay attention to and still hold it together to live in the reality we know.