Monday, April 25, 2011

On Productivity and Particle Physics

A supposed internal note leaked a couple days ago, which upon examination appears to be a loose abstract for a technical paper to be published by four researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN outside Geneva, Switzerland. The paper outlines data which would indicate the detection of decay particles which would result from the brief creation of the long-sought Higgs boson, the theoretical particle (in the sense that all other forces with in the standard model of physics have their own bosons already) which would grant matter the quality of mass, thus conveying the gravitational force and making everything in the entire universe work. You know, at all.

This would be huge, if it's not an Easter-Fools Day prank. Or an error. Or anything else.

It's actually super-cool because if it's true, then the Higgs, or really one Higgs if there are different types, would be about 30 times heavier than it 'should' be. This completely screws over the whole standard model, but might actually help simplify everything Out There, since we've been getting crazier and crazier trying to figure out why what we see isn't antithetical to existence even though by all observations it really should be.

Maybe everything's heavier at certain scales and there's no such thing as dark matter. That'd be great, because dark matter's supposed to be it's own anti-particle, so if two pieces of it ever touched, despite trying everything possible to avoid doing so, both will instantly annihilate in an incredibly energetic reaction.

To put that in perspective, it'd be like when your normal productivity suddenly takes a nosedive right after you start watching all previous seasons of a new show on Netflix.

Or more precisely, it's like when I started re-watching Season 3 of 'Jersey Shore'
for my book and realized it was killing my desire to have anything more to do with 'Jersey Shore.'

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