Particle Physics and Bowling Balls

While the world has been waiting for some significant research to come from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a new discovery was recently made at the smaller, less-powerful Tevatron collider at the Fermilab in the US. The discovery may indicate a new subatomic particle or force never witnessed before. Or it could be a fluke.

According to Christopher Hill, a Theorist at Fermilab, "Nobody knows what this is." (http://goo.gl/4SY9y) Hill is spot on, because honestly, no one can be sure if any of the experiments ever done in colliders is a truthful exploration of the nature of matter.

Accelerators are some of the most sophisticated scientific instruments humans have created. They are also some of the most violent.  The science is equivalent to trying to understand the nuances of the human mind by dropping a bowling ball on someone's head from the top of the Empire State Building and examining the bits of brain on the sidewalk to build a model of how the whole thing works. A brutal image, for sure, but why do we not consider that a true understanding in particle physics comes from a holistic context.

All we can say is that the collision of particles at very high energies (speed) – such as the smashing of two protons – will result in an explosion of smaller particles and forces with very odd behaviors. These smaller particles – like quarks – are almost never seen under natural conditions. And following collisions, the life spans of these particles are very short as they quickly collapse into one another to be annihilated or recombined into larger particles.

We can take solace in the science of the great accelerators and the resulting standard model of particle physics, despite its inability to explain important concepts like gravity and wave-particle duality. Or we can ask better questions, like what is the song that guides the secret delicate dance of energy that creates the reality we experience as matter. To discern this, we must understand how everything is connected in its natural state. If we can do that, we may understand a little more about who we are.