One Brick Short

There is a last chance for everything -- Arthur Clarke

I’m a little nervous about the UVa guys searching for the basic building block of the universe, the so-called “God” particle.

If you haven’t checked out astro-physicist/brain scientist/rocket surgery reporter Brian McNeill’s story in the D-P, you need to. Seems Brad Cox over at the big U is looking for the subatomic particled called Higgs boson, or God Particle because it is believed to be the origin of all mass.

There’s some cool things they could do if they find it, of course. If you know what causes mass, you can make an anti-mass diet agent and sell more waistlines than Jenny Craig. You can corner the market on churches.

“We’re on the threshold of a paradigm shift in the field of physics,” Cox said. “for practical purposes, this kinid of project is on the level of going to the moon.”

I don’t think so. I think this kind of project is more on the level of Arthur Clarke’s short-story, The Nine-billion Names of God. Seems a group of Buddhist monks spent a long, long time creating a language in which they could effectively spell all of God’s names in one nine-letter word. As a computer they devised whirled out the names, the protaganists talked:

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will have been achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”

So, if we find the smallests particle, the very origin of mass and matter, have we, in effect, found the last name of God? If so, we could be in for trouble. The men take off out of the monastery before the computer finishes and, as they turn toward civilization they look up in the sky and “without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

It would be nice if Mr. Cox calls Mr. McNeill just before locates the old Higgs boson. There’s some things I need to do before the end of the world.