I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks

Friday, July 6, 2012

That didn't take long


A Higgs boson walks into a church.
The priest says, "I'm sorry but we don't recognize your existence."
The boson replies, "Well, you can't have mass without me."

The particle traces found at CERN may or may not turn out to be the elusive Higgs boson, but it's useful to take a few minutes to pause and ponder the essential strangeness of this wonderful universe, where a soup of impossibly small particles somehow ended up being matter (rather than antimatter), an is rather than a potential.

Then atoms, light, rock, flesh, life. And now a being who thinks of itself as Kathleen and finds this joke amusing.

Having made my brain hurt thinking about it all, the very large and the very small, doing the dishes and packing for a weekend in Philly seems not just ridiculously easy but also, somehow, miraculous.



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