By TERRY CUMMINS
Local Columnist
July 06, 2008 01:15 am
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The human race has never been content to leave well enough alone. The human mind is too restless, always going off on a tangent or off its rocker. For instance, in August, scientists are going to switch on the most powerful atom-smasher ever conceived by the mind of man. Why do they need to smash more atoms? What they should do is smash some of the oil people to get gas back to a dollar, which is so weak it’s about dead.
Somebody has spent $5.8 billion on what’s called a Large Hadron Collider. It’s a large super-cooled magnet 17 miles in circumference straddling the Swiss-French border and buried 330 feet underground. Can we trust physicists or the French? When the collider starts spinning and smashing atoms right and left, we do not know the result. Some think it might reveal invisible matter or extra dimensions in space. Some anxious scientists think our planet might be sucked into a black hole or turned into a hot dead clump if we keep tinkering with God’s business.
Our planet is already a clump, which is caused by the “human particle.” This particle has been spinning, colliding and smashing into each other for centuries. It intensified when the Bush and Clinton families began leading the world, and now George W has put us back into a cave-man existence. And if Hillary should become vice-president, she might be a Chaney type and then we’ll continue smashing and colliding.
There is hope, because Obama said there was. He wrote a book called “The Audacity of Hope.” I read it and I think he’s too full of audacity himself. You can’t give 46 million Americans health insurance, stop the war, cool the earth and raise the dollar up to 17 cents. This country needs change, and McCain says he’s the man. He’s being accused of being a Bush-Chaney clone, but they’re changers and decided to fight the longest war in our history. There I go again, going off on a political tangent, but that’s what life is — politics, which is the biggest mistake ever devised by human particles.
What if physicists find the “God particle?” As I understand it — I don’t — they’re attempting to find a subatomic Higgs boson. I thought Higgs played shortstop for the Dodgers back in the ’30s. But it was British physicist Peter Higgs who postulated the existence of the boson particle in the atom more than 40 years ago. A boson is a particle with zero spin. With me? If scientists can find one, it’s believed they can re-create the rapidly changing conditions in the universe a split second after the Big Bang, which caused you and me. Then they’ll have to determine if God created the Big Bang, and we’ll be back to square one.
Well, Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman thinks discovery of a theoretical boson could unify understanding of particle physics and help humans “know the mind of God.” There we go again mixing science and religion. If God wanted us to know his mind, He’d tell us. God gave man a mind, and look how that’s turned out. Man’s mind has become so complex, unpredictable and silly, it must boggle God’s.
We had it all, fruits from the garden, cheeseburgers and cleansing, refreshing rain. But no, man had to bottle it. According to Elizabeth Royte’s book, Bottlemania, Americans spent $11 billion last year on bottled water — more than was spent on beer, coffee and milk. We also ship millions of weak dollars worth of bottled water to Iraq, and a barrel of bottled water is considerably more expensive than a barrel of crude.
Now here’s what scientists hope to accomplish. Follow carefully. According to a newspaper, they plan to “hunt for signs of the invisible dark matter and dark energy that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson particle thought to give matter its mass.” If discovering a boson, scientists believe it will give evidence of extra dimensions and support super-string theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings. Infinitesimal has always thrown me, and quarks, too.
I have a theory. If “dark matter” makes up 96 percent of the universe, about 90 percent of is in Washington. Scientists should experiment with injecting more gray-matter particles into the brains of those deciding and changing things.
Terry Cummins thinks we should collide with each other less. Contact at TLCTLC@AOL.com
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Terry Cummins, Local Columnist