Hello, all of you who seek after knowledge…and all
the rest of you who are waiting for the movie version of it to come out on DVD or Blu-Ray. It’s
Science Boy here, ready to stuff your craniums full of whatever it is they
happen not to be full of at the moment.
So,
another bunch from the University of Slow Learners has found more evidence for
the existence of the Higgs boson—the so-called “God particle” that was the
driving force in turning the Universe from a great big mass of nothingness
into the carnival of wonders, full of awe-inspiring splendours and the
occasional broken toaster, that it is today. Well, pardon me if I don’t stand
up on my chair and cheer (for one thing, I get vertigo and nosebleeds when I do
things like that). Back when good old Peter Higgs still thought a boson was
someone who worked on a ship, my team at the Legion of Goodness’ Department of
Potentially Hazardous Experiments had already identified more sub-sub-subatomic
particles than there are grains of sand in a golfer’s shoes after a bad back
nine. We were planning to hold onto our
findings until Judgement Day, then spring them on an unsuspecting
particle-filled God, with a triumphant cry of “thought you’d fooled us pretty
good, huh?”, but now that our hand has been forced by these
Higgsy-come-latelys, we have no choice but to publish them. Here’s a sample of
our findings, soon to be released as a tell-all memoir in the always-attractive
coffee-table book format, under the working title Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Stuff You Can’t See, Hear,
Smell, or Touch, But Were Afraid to Ask If It Had Any Bearing on Your Everyday
Life.
Among the more interesting bosons, mesons, leptons,
gluons, quarks, and quarkettes (these are like quarks, but are situated in more
reasonably-priced neighbourhoods with better access to public transit) which
we’ve discovered—every last one of which
is just as important in its own way as the “God particle”—are the following:
- The “Oh God, it’s you again” particle. The action of this particle helps to explain why
people we can’t stand, or can’t face seeing—especially our exes—have a
tendency to show up just when we don’t really feel like dealing with anything at
all, much less with them.
- The “God is dead and so is my research grant application”
particle is spontaneously generated by the clouds of negative energy
surrounding graduate students’ pubs and common rooms. Those affected by it have
a tendency to make feeble witticisms using quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche.
- The “If God did not exist, we would have to invent Him” particle
is similar to the particle just noted, but generally affects
graduate students of eighteenth-century French literature, causing them to
make feeble witticisms using quotes from Voltaire. (As an example of this,
those who disagree with this particle’s existence will defend to the death
anybody’s right to believe in it.)
- The “What in God’s name is this?” particle creates
phenomena whose constituent parts show no indication that they should ever
function properly as a whole. It’s responsible for inexplicable things like the
platypus, most of what’s sold at IKEA , and the European Economic Union.
- As the reference to the EuroZone suggests, the
particle just mentioned can be found in overabundance in the work of people who
themselves have an overabundance of the “God complex” particle. This one explains why otherwise
sane and rational individuals choose to go into politics, as well as why it’s
so hard to convince a politician that they might just possibly be mistaken
about something—never mind horribly, irredeemably, and tragically wrong.
- More insidious is the “God only knows what you were thinking”
particle. Due to fluctuations in levels of cosmic radiation, the
universe is periodically bathed in waves of this one. One such occurrence of
this was during the 1970s, which may explain why people wore plaid polyester suits
and voted twice for Richard Nixon. There was a similar occurrence in the 1990s,
which may explain why people paid to see Adam Sandler movies and thought Y2K
was real—and why many of the same people who’d voted twice for Nixon and swore
they’d never get fooled again by such an obvious liar also voted twice for Bill
Clinton.
-On rare occasions, the “God complex” and “God only knows
what you were thinking” particles fuse to form a single entity. This
is called the “My
God, you’re actually NOT ashamed to admit that you’re an economist”
particle. There is no known cure yet for the slow, creeping, terminal brain
damage caused by exposure to this particle’s toxic emanations. All we can do is
diagnose the symptoms, the most sadly pathetic of which is the inability to
distinguish between pictures of deceased political hacks or reigning figurehead monarchs on pieces of coloured paper
and actual living, breathing people.
- Evidence for the existence of the “Please God, make it
stop” particle can be found on a nightly basis in practically every comedy club in the
world. In fact, thanks to the proliferation of curiously-named “comedy channels”
on cable and satellite TV, a steady stream of this particle is being beamed
from Earth into the Solar System. We may yet live to see invaders from Saturn
batter us into submission with a heavy bombardment of stale one-liners about airlines,
relationships, and the myriad of not-altogether-amusing ways in which New York
and Los Angeles differ from one other.
-Last, but certainly not least, is the “God bless us,
every one” particle. Also known as the “Tiny Tim” particle, it creates
a sense of boundless and largely unjustified optimism among those who have
every reason to complain about the hand that life has dealt them. So far, our research seems to indicate that,
on any given day, this may be all that’s keeping things ticking over in the
cosmos as a whole.
‘Til we
meet again, vaya con Dios—or at least a particle of Dios, at any rate.
Science Boy
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