The Stratocaster Effect

(My, what a large Hadron you have!)

Did you hear? They found God. He’s in Switzerland.

That would explain the chocolate.

Actually, they only found a piece (God, not the chocolate). What they found was some subatomic thing scientists are calling the “god particle.” And, based on all the high-fiving, toasting, and extremely lame dancing going on in scientist singles’ bars, this discovery is the biggest thing since monogrammed lab goggles.

With the discovery of this god particle, the scientific world looks to have confirmed four things:

1)      All matter was probably created by a subatomic scientist named Bo Higgs

2)      All matter is probably held together by an analogy starring Justin Bieber

3)      Probability Theory is probably 50% wrong, though they could be wrong

4)      Richard Dawkins just flat-out refuses to shampoo

But first, some background. We realize that not everybody speaks fluent scientist; besides, we’re talking about the theoretical existence of particles so small that it would take six of them to make France surrender.

For years, physicists had been trying to explain the subatomic world using something known as the Standard Model, so named because physicists, as a rule, don’t have very large Marketing budgets. However, the Standard Model had a gaping flaw, if we can use the word “gaping” to describe something smaller than Joe Biden’s collection of Pink Floyd albums. But Physics was stuck with the Standard (see Marketing budgets), so they needed some way to fill that gap.

See, their model had no mechanism to explain why some particles seem to be massless (like the photon, which is not only the quantum bit for light, but also our primary defense against Klingons), while other particles have varying degrees of mass (W and Z bosons, practicing Catholics, Marlon Brando).

According to Physics, all particles should be without mass, zipping around freely and unrestrained, like Justin Bieber or Joe Biden.

For years, physicists were at a loss to explain this subatomic weight gain, this one-off oddity, and most universities didn’t have the budget to spring for a hypothetical exception – what’s known as a ‘singularity’ (literal translation: ‘unmarried arity’).

And then, along came the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson was hypothesized in the 1960s by two Brits, Peter Higgs and Eric Clapton. Theoretically, its mechanism set up a field (named “Sally”) that interacts with particles to endow them with mass, much like eating a meal prepared by Paula Dean. And the Higgs boson is the particle associated with that hypothetical field.

For over forty years, physicists had to simply assume that the Higgs field existed; meanwhile, there was overwhelming evidence to prove the existence of Eric Clapton. But in order to keep getting grant money from the Federal Stimulus Czars In Charge Of Stimulating Federal Stimulus Czars, the Physics departments had to either come up with a plausible explanation or start selling Buicks.

But because these theoretical particles were, well, theoretical, the desperate scientists had to settle for using analogies. And because I’m not good enough to make this stuff up, one of the analogies they came up with was…

Justin Bieber.

The analogy goes something like this: Imagine a cocktail party, but one that’s cool, not one filled with socially awkward scientists arguing over disparate lime covalent ratios in theoretical Mai-Tais. Normal sane guests and celebrity stalker guests easily move back and forth across the room, unimpeded by the presence (mass) of the other guests, unless one of the other guests is a singularity, like film-maker Michael Moore, who has such a mass of mass that other, smaller film-makers are trapped in an orbit around him. (what astronomers call ‘moons’ and what we call ‘sycophants’)

But, continuing with our cocktail party analogy, when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, all the wide-eyed fame-stricken guests press around him so tightly that he can hardly hit either of his two notes … and then, once he and his hair begin to move, the crowd are bonded to him in such a way that the unified group become a nearly unstoppable force, like Al Sharpton when he sees a microphone.

And in case you’re still buying any of this analogy bilge, here’s the payoff: The crowd are massless particles, the celeb stalkers are Higgs bosons, and Justin Bieber is a massive Z boson.

And that, kids, is how everything in the universe was formed, except for Richard Dawkins.

Go ahead. Admit it. You just don’t get hard science like this from most humor columns.

Moving from the theoretical to the practical, however, requires the physicists to adopt a different mindset. And most physicists I know are guys. And most guys I know equate “practical” with one of four things:

1)      Women

2)      Food

3)      Women who brought food

4)      Blowing stuff up

So naturally, some guys decided that the best way to get a Higgs boson to behave, to get it to come when you called it, was to blow it up.

What this particular particle challenge wanted was a super-powerful particle smasher, something that would produce energies violent enough to knock a Higgs boson into existence. And since the Jerry Springer Show was already booked, the scientists rang up Switzerland, known for countless generations as the go-to country when one wants unbridled violence, or hot chocolate.

Nestled in a non-disclosed location outside Geneva is one of humankind’s crowning achievements: Brigitte Bardot. But in a tunnel nearby is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Earth’s largest and highest-energy closed-loop accelerator, if you don’t count NASCAR.

A collaboration by the European agency CERN, the LHC hopes to answer some of the most fundamental questions in Physics by deploying the time-honored tactic of full-contact violence. The LHC is a 17-mile concrete-lined ring, specifically designed to accelerate protons and then smash them into each other, the quantum equivalent of a Three Stooges sketch.

When the LHC is running at its full design power of 7 TeV per beam, protons will excite at discrete intervals until they have a Lorentz factor of 7,500 and move at about 0.999 999 991c in a superconducting dipole magnet field of 8.3 teslas, as you would expect, and you probably figured that out already, and you’re lying.

The LHC gang had been slamming stuff into stuff for decades. They’d already defined the pro-Higgs scatter patterns that would match their theories. They’d already collected data for roughly a quadrillion proton-on-proton collisions. (they used really big legal pads) They’d been exciting protons at every opportunity, including some protons of questionable age.

And then, earlier this summer, all their efforts apparently paid off. Somewhere in that tesla-dripping tunnel, during one of those quad-whatever collisions, something ticked on somebody’s monitor.

And suddenly it was Party Time, in a sad, pathetic, smart-people-who-don’t-get-out-much kind of way.

Some threshold was achieved, some theoretical condition met. Some sensor chirped, some console lit up. A gauge red-lined, knocking a Brigitte Bardot calendar into an iPod’s ‘play’ button. Wailing riffs from Eric Clapton’s “Old Love” sparked through the tunnel.

Nobody moved, nobody dared breathe. Time stood still, although it can’t. And then…there it was.

Peeking out from behind a bruised, dizzy proton – there it was. The universal constant. The grail. The glue that binds our whole universe.

The Higgs boson.

And standing behind the boson, representing the other proton in the collision …

Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred.