Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Grandma ponders particle physics

We’re told that Life-Long Learning (LLL) leads to Vital Long Life (VLL). Having a VLL sounds good to me and people here at the retirement community encourage it. One way is through the large library collection of “The Great Courses.” We can choose from numerous DVDs where experts teach us stuff like “The Military History of Ancient Rome,” “Cycles of American Political Thought,” or “Gnosticism.” While I’m not interested in all of those topics, I occasionally find gems.

Well, gems and duds. One recent dud was a lecture series on the history of the English language. I love that topic, but this course was unimaginatively presented. An ancient and somber professor, complete with formal suit and bowtie, droned on an on in monotone. He could make any topic boring. I dropped the course after two lectures.

The gem of the year turned out to be a course on the secrets of particle physics. Hal has always had a scientific turn of mind, and I love mysteries. It was a perfect match, so we watched the whole series together. The professor was a young, enthusiastic physicist from the University of Colorado who actually had a sense of humor. That helped.

I enjoyed the course, but at the end of it I must confess that the interactions of time, space, and matter remained mysterious. I did gain an understanding of the questions scientists are asking and how they’re going about the search for answers. And I obtained a new vocabulary. I love the words from the world of particle physics.

As I flipped through my notes after the course, a number of poems spilled out. Of course. They’re all short, corresponding to my unscientific mind. The phrases in italics are direct quotes.

Read and learn! Or laugh, which is almost the same thing.


 

Some Short Poems on Particle Physics

Take the neutrino,
a weak force that is completely bizarre.
It has no mass, no charge,
but it spins and cruises through matter
without so much as a by-your-leave.
It is, says the professor,
the most esoteric, wispy, ghost-like particle there is.
Coming directly from the center of the sun,
it invades downward through the roof
and upward through the floor
of Friendsview Manor, where I happen to live,
to bombard my body at the rate
of 100 billion neutrinos per square centimeter per second.

No wonder I feel so tired.

* * * *

And then there’s the Higgs-boson particle
and the Higgs-field that permeates space.
It’s apparently massive and is responsible for symmetry breaking.
I guess it’s good to know who--or what--to blame.
But, as our professor assures us, symmetry breaking is good.
The world is boring when things are perfectly symmetrical.

* * * *

I’ve learned
that there is a strong force and a weak force,
that the strong force produces total strangeness,
while the weak force has a history of being weird.
I believe both statements but remain uncertain
about the difference between “strange” and “weird.”

* * * *

You can create something out of nothing, claims the professor,
speaking of particle production in an accelerator,
but only for a really short time.

* * * *

Three basic definitions:
The sun is a smeared-out fuzz ball of hydrogen gas….
Quarks are little point-like objects that buzz around….
Gluon is the force that makes things stick together.
Good to know.

* * * *

Quarks, the professor assures us,
are as real as Pluto.
I’m sure he means the planet,
but the floppy-eared Disney hound pops into my brain.
It doesn’t matter; both are real,
so I guess quarks are, too.

* * * *

To step into the future, we now have a big TOE—
a “Theory Of Everything.”
That’s not as arrogant as it sounds,
but rather a hope of one day discovering at the simplest level
what ties all life together.
He sums up the class by telling us the Big Idea behind it all—
that the world is orderly.
I suspected as much.

Having completed the physics course, I am now enjoying VLL (“Vital Long Life”). And I’m in the middle of another Great Course, this one entitled “How To Play the Guitar.” While I don’t anticipate going on any future performance tours, this Great Course is certainly Great Fun.

 


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