In a futile effort to educate myself, I took a tour of the subatomic particle world this week, only to discover I am ignorant there also—it’s definite. The main difference being that before I was ignorant of being ignorant and I much prefer those days.
I recall the world was simple then and so were atoms: manly protons hugging sexy neutrons with electrons keeping a close watch all around, like high energy parents. Now we find that we were wrong, so wrong, and there was more to it than that, tons more, like muons, bosons, fermions, leptons, and pions, to name a few. Then there’s morons, that don’t know which way to spin, and máricons, that can spin either way and often do, plus whatnot-ons—all too many to mention. The main thing I discovered, however, and of some value I suppose, was that everything has an opposite, even two or three opposites, nothing is what you think it is, and uncertainty is the new kid in town. It even has a respectable name: the Uncertainty Principle.
Forget Einstein: he knew nothing. Actually, from what I’ve read, nobody knows anything and elementary particles, those made up of composite particles as well as standalone particles are proof of that: many are suspected, while most haven’t been discovered yet and are not even suspected. What’s more, or less, for every plus there is a minus for every bland one, there is one with flavor, lots of flavors, then there’s matter we can see and dark matter that we know is there but can’t see. For every spin there is a counter spin, for every half spin, for every quarter spin . . . you get my point. Every up-quark has a down-quark nearby, keeping track of it, meantime, there’s a strong force and a weak force duking it out in the background, and stuff like gravitons that were predicted (yes, Einstein—I take back what I said before, it was only to get Roland agitated) but not yet discovered . . . or maybe recently just discovered—the results still being analyzed. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard of, and so it goes.
My hope: one day they will discover the anti-graviton. Actually, considering everything else has an opposite, I will upgrade my hope to blatant unapologetic prediction. It may take years to prove me right, but I’ll be in good company!
mt