#60 "I Give the Mass." Continued His High Quarkness. "but Not THAT Kind."

[c.f. last post]

No, not related, etymologically. There's a great joke going around though: a Higgs boson walks into church and the priest says, "I'm sorry we don't allow sub-atomic particles." The boson parries, "But you can't have MASS without me."  hahaha. I love a good laugh because it's serious stuff literally, that I deal with down here, 24/7 times infinity--a real head- (if I had one) ache keeping all those other quirky quarklets (some officially monikered e.g. "strange" and "charm"  no kidding) in line, giving them mass, and a certain gravitas. Haha ...told you  This is why I affectionately refer to St. Peter of  Higgs also as Dr Higglety-Pigglety. The quantum scene is to my poetic ear (if I had one) a double-dactyl rumbling-tumbling surreal sort of miasmic musical maelstrom (ha) that even I/ME find hard to believe in.                                                                               

[1] But back to the point: mass in the hieratic sense derives from the Late Latin "Ite, missa est" which means literally in order "Go,  dismissal is" from the past participle of mittere, to put, to put out, to place, to go,  etc. (and cognate with so many other Latin borrowings like mission and mess, in the sense of meal – the putting-out and placing thereof). Did I mention that I dearly love Latin, my second language? Well, so the Ite etc. phrase means more loosely something like Go away, it's put-you-out time. Funny isn't it that the parishioners would remember the end of the service as if glad to be through with it, rather than the beginning or the middle or the whole. The poor peasants didn't understand a word that was being said anyway. But in the late Middle Ages with the usual linguistic forces of phonetic compression and folk etymology ( the sense of "massing" together) at work, the phrase became the single word mass, unrelated historically to any other usage. But I love folk, and their etymology, and massing-together is so sweet an idea to a sentimental Old Particle at heart, if I had one – haha, somebody please stop me – because there's a symbolic connection at least between the priestish mass and myself. We're both in the congregation business – aggregating, gathering together bunches of people massed together at these holy functions, like e.g. the "masses" showing up in huge quantities for Funny Hat Day at St. Peter's (pace Higgs) Basilica most famously on Easter Sunday.

[2] But for me, the original Matter-Maker, mass has in fact a much more ancient and pregnant meaning, if you will. Goes like this: Proto-Indo-European root into Greek "Massein" = to knead (massage is related), and then into the Latin noun masa, the finished product = a lump of dough. Interesting creational implications here of course. and even Eucharistic. Matter is another matter – ultimately coming from another Latin  borrowing: mater, and, hey, I'm sort of in the mothering business myself. One more thing and I'll shut up:

[3] As to mess, as in meal, repast, brunch, munchies, snack, etc-- it's like the biblical mess of pottage or modern mess hall or in the epigraph to this blog's fraternal twin Daily Mosteller Weekly (below masthead), which asks the reader pun-ishingly to sit down to a "mess" of memes and mummery. You would expect the form to be related to the mass-masa-maize lump-o'-dough family, but no. We're back to  the holy service once again with that workhorse Latin verb mittere, which means, we recall, to place or put out though NOT in this sense the parishioners, but rather a meal. Of course the Eucharist is in its own way a mess, and after church they could mass in the mess hall and maybe get a group massage ...

Our interviewee continued in this vein for some time, later extolling in particular the virtues of the old-timey Latin form of mass, even praising current practitioners like Mel Gibson and Antonin Scalia as among his favorites, reminding us that grammar school originally meant learning LATIN grammar back in the day (one simply KNEW English already, forheavensake), and that Anglo-Humans should return to the old practice of high-school Latin for everybody, and Greek in college. Modern languages--pshaw. After this lengthy divigation the Supreme Quarkman returned to the issues at hand::

However, jokes and etymology aside, there's a nice parallel here because I AM in the congregation/aggregation business. I get things together and afford them weight and quant-ity, so to speak ... and then let them go. There's a cosmic cuteness there--don't you agree?-- and I'm the guy-particle who does it, by God. My good friend Peter Higgs figured it out mathematically. Another old friend, Pythagoras, had it half-right when he said that mathematics gives you the key to the universe, but only after you humans bumped your heads and started counting things. Incidentally, isn't it weird that Pythagoas, the first great "bean counter" in history, hated beans and forbade his followers from eating them! But I digress. Sorry. My first interview after all. Anyway, for Peter Higgs Ph.D. my quarkhood just had to be there, somehow, either as a particle, or field, or maybe both at the same time. Also weird, but that's Quantumland for you. Kudos to the young man– oops, it was 50 years ago– who predicted me, and now the CERN people, whoever they are, confirming my existence in the Large Hadron Collider, whatever that is.. I understand that they actually have sparkly images of me in action, or I should say REaction, to some pretty painful neutron bombardment just short of the speed of light. Ouch.  One of Me only lasts a Godzillionth of a second, but they managed to get me in the picture. You should be able to detect a smile.

Higgs Boson Residue, Two Lines on Right

This reporter readily agreed with the painful aspect of his experience because I had spent some stock-still bombardment-time in an MRI sound tunnel while in terrible back and sciatic pain ... and could sympathize. I felt like a subHUMAN particle. So why was it, I asked, that he/it could "crack" a smile, as it were. And how did it feel personally to be a SUB-atomic particle, the lowliest of the low in the material universe, not up even to the atomic level ... a fortiori the molecular and above (using a little Latin to put him at ease).

I'll take the second question first: technically I'm not quite a quark, since they discovered so many of us little buggers at Fermilab or Livermore or someplace North American, exploding the atom into all of those literally strange and plasmatic parts underlying everything that is or ever was even onto the Big Bang. They had to rename some of us undergirding the atom, which poor unsung Democritas, another old friend, discovered some 2500 years ago! I'm a big-banger, you know, from the very beginning of things. And remember, young man, I keep YOUR (M)ASS together. So I'm lately not a quark because of something or other, I don't know, but a boson. Nothing against the term quark – and I'll explain that in a minute –but I do alternatively like the very sound of  b o s o n. Pronounce it. How deep and masculine it is, and dignified, suitable for one in charge of massivity throughout the shiny parts of the universe. Sonorous. Nothing wimpy or tinny to the ear. Two great (un-morphemic) half-words as well: bow and son, the whole comprising deep-throated, low-back vowels. Nice.

But back to quarkitude: I don't mind being lumped with with those guys; they're terrific crazy twee things ...  fun to be with. I have, on the other hand, the weightiness of a proton or neutron, I'm told, all the better to throw it around and get these little Big-Bangers into a bonding frame of mind. Got to, in order to make things work, and let the graviton do ITS thing. And BTW I'm just crazy about Finnegan's Wake, though even I can't understand it. But I know enough to know that Murray Gell-Mann and his gang were right on track, and in probably a celebratory state, in naming all of us drunken and shaky maelstrom mavens after a phrase from the novel. The barman of the public house yells to a dipsodic regular, "Three quarks [quarts] for Muster Mark!"

 Since I forgot question #3, if there was one, I'll answer #1: Why am I smiling? Well, it's like this: as for the material, luminous universe, YOU'VE NOW GOT ALL THE ANSWERS ... right down to the singularity and the act of creation, a.k.a. the Big Bang. The subatomic quantum world is complete. No more mystery. Okay, y'all may need to deal with arcane problems like oscillating neutrinos etc etc and blah blah a bigger puzzlement afforded by those dread twins, Dark Matter and Dark Energy that seem to make up only the other 95% of the cosmos! But no more need for the SUPERnatural to answer the age-old question of how you got here. I am the answer. Here's the catch.[another smile] It's a terrifying but at the same time liberating idea that you humankind have reluctantly known in your hearts for a long time: you're on your own.

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#59 "Yes, Virginia," Says the God Particle, "'There Really Is a ME."

Hiya, kids Hiya! ... or as I should say, 'Yea and Verily,' to keep up godish decorum here for the doubting Virginias and Thomases out there. That's Me, Your Everlovin' Holiness, sort of on the lower left--where FINALLY, after 3 million years of evolution, the humanoid brain of one Reverend Dr. Higgelty-Pigglety, as I playfully like to call him as only I can, got it right. To My mind--and I've got the biggest one--Peter Higgs will go down as a PROPHET surpassing Jesus or Mohamed any day of My week! And you guys at CERN, whatever that means, CONFIRMED it ...  bless your hearts--I'm  a QUARK!"

Of course, Mr. Yahweh's first statement was in the form of sparky and blippy things transmuted somehow onto computer machines at the Large Hadron Collider, someplace European. The resulting interview is a mathematical translation of literally TRILLIONS of the sparky-blippy things into readable Latin prose, then King James English, and finally--

That's right. [said the Subatomic One] I'm one in a trillion, upon more trillions ad infinatum--just loves Me that Latin, by the way, though I don't speak it very well--but then who DOES these days?! Ha, Ha  Not my native tongue, as if I had one. Sorry. But to get all quantumy on you: I GIVE the MASS.  .............

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#25 Two Books by Steven Berlin Johnson

Saw this pop-science/pop-culture author last March on "The Colbert Report," promoting his latest book, The Invention of Air (2008), ambitiously subtitled, "A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America." It's really all about Joseph Priestley, who has been a hero of mine for a number of reasons, and for a goodly number of years. Long library waiting-list. Just got it a couple of weeks ago, and a review is to follow in the fullness of time.

Meanwhile, I got hold of his earlier book, Everything Bad Is Good For You (2005), subtitled, almost as ambitiously, "How Today's Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter." Johnson's study of what I'll over-simply call "techno-culture" and it's effect on our collective gray-matter IS good for you, and will make you smarter and--this is most important--less guilty about the time you and/or your kids spend on playing video-games or watching television.

Johnson's got some science to back that up, but first, he got me hooked early on when he explains his central thesis by coining a metaphor from a Woody Allen movie!--

... popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years. Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a dumbing down--"an increasingly infantilized society," in George Will's words-- I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year ... making our minds sharper, as we soak-in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff. I call this upward trend the Sleeper Curve, after the classic sequence from Woody Allen's mock sci-fi film, where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional benefits of cream pies and hot fudge.

That's the author's only reference to the movie--he assumes probably correctly that most of his readership would've seen it, or at least heard about that "classic sequence." However, it's just too good not to share more fully with the Myriad Readers. Sleeper (1973) is perhaps my favorite from Allen's early, "mainly-funny-with-some-social-satire" period. Here one of Woody's trademark "schlemiel" characters, Miles Monroe, is brought back from an accidental cryonic state 2oo years into the future. His former diet was a regimen of all the hippie food-fads of the day; in fact, to hammer the point home unmercifully, Allen has him working at a health-food store! After thawing him out, two scientist-doctors discuss the morning after, all the while puffing on their cigarettes:

--For breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger's milk."
--Oh yes [chuckling]. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
--You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or ... hot fudge?
--Those were thought to be unhealthy ... precisely the opposite of what we know to be true.
--Incredible.

Or later when, after they advise him to be sure to inhale deeply on a proffered cigarette, Miles confronts them with his confusion:

--Where am I anyhow? I mean, What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
--You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly 200 years.
--But they all ate organic rice!

This is the author's Sleeper Curve. Video-games bad? Nope. Turns out they're good for you after all. They are only one aspect of an intellectually rich, high-tech landscape through which a modern 10-year-old navigates: "shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching." That last was written before likes of Twitter and FaceBook (etc.) came into prominence, which can only further his point. Compare all of this to the rather simple-minded recreational toys and games of the past, and again you get his point. New stuff make brain good.

Public classrooms may be overcrowded and teachers underpaid--traditional test scores continue to go down--but outside of school kids' brains are developing sophisticated problem-solving skills. And IQ scores continue to go up. That's right: over the past 50 years Americans have improved by about 15 points, half of that in the last couple of decades. Johnson believes the paradox is solved when we look at what IQ tests test: problem solving, abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, spatial logic--a sufficiency of all of which is to be found in modern media technology. Q.E.D.

Even prime-time television has become more intellectually rigorous over the last couple of decades, Johnson believes. And I like his take on it. Ever since Hill Street Blues, he says (to paraphrase), a story-arc with multiple plot-threads has been de rigueur for the most successful sitcoms--popularly and critically--from Simpsons to Seinfeld to my current favorite, Scrubs. (Though I might contend that it really got started with shows like All In the Family and Mary Tyler Moore.) No longer "present tense" from one episode to the next, where the bare-bones "situation" was enough for the viewer to "get" the joke--Three's Company, Home Improvement--the newer shows require external references, an accumulated context that the audience must draw upon in order to be in the know. (That's why they're so popular in reruns: the viewers already have their ready-made "insider's playbook") Johnson points out Sam's past drinking-problem in Cheers, for example, or George Costanza's made-up character/entity "Art Vandelay," who appears in several episodes of Seinfeld. And I'll add the notorious "Master of My Domain" episode which keeps coming back in the form of "self-denial" in-jokes throughout the rest of the series.

Finally, and incidentally, my kids came up and along a bit before the monster techno-media revolution--somewhat ahead of the Sleeper Curve--but the author cites various fantasy and role-playing games as possible precursors to that revolution. One of those he mentions is Dungeons and Dragons, to which my first three sons were devoted player-aficionados. As far as I know, they never gave it up. I guess that's why they're so very, very smart. Or not.
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#21 The Milky Way--One Less Thing To Worry About

Good News for a change. Concerns over those pesky dwarf-galaxies threatening our own have been allayed. Oh, one of them in our "local group" will collide with us all right, and fairly soon, but the damage would be, in all probability, minimal. In a new study released Monday, coordinated by Ohio State, a group of astronomers from California to the UK have determined through computer modeling that the halo of DARK MATTER around the Milky Way will be what saves us from annihilation. Whew! Close call.

It's only been within my lifetime that other galaxies were definitively proven to be other galaxies. Before that they were "nebulae" or cosmic clouds circling what was considered the center of the universe: the Milky Way itself. I can well remember my old science textbooks referring to the Crab and Andromeda nebulae, and the Magellanic Cloud. Nothing about galaxies. There were early speculations, especially after Galileo spotted stars amidst these formations. None other than the polymathic Immanuel Kant, for example, thought they might conceal "island universes." But it ultimately took two "Hubbles" to pin it down. First, Edwin Hubble himself got hold of a powerful enough telescope in the 1930's to confirm that these island universes were not part of our galaxy, and even started classifying them (ours is a Spiral, which we see only from within snd sideways in the night sky). And later, his namesake Hubble Space Telescope finally left no doubt. High-school textbooks have I hope caught up by now.

Anyway, lead-astronomer Stelios ("star"?!) Kazantzidis and his colleagues performed detailed computer simulations to determine what would happen when a satellite galaxy collides with a spiral galaxy buffered by Dark Matter, like ours. Result: lovely "puffy edges," as he calls them. The studies show that the satellite galaxy would gradually disintegrate, while its gravity tugged on the edges of a larger galaxy, one like the test-model Andromeda, drawing out stars and other materials in the process. Kazantzidas concludes:

We can't know for sure what's going to happen to the Milky Way, but we can say that our findings apply to a broad class of galaxies similar to our own. Our simulations showed that the satellite galaxy impacts don't destroy spiral galaxies--they actually drive their evolution, by producing this flared shape and creating stellar rings--spectacular rings of stars that we've seen in many spiral galaxies in the universe.

Who would have thought that Dark Matter could be such a great friend. And a wonderful decorator to boot. Put's my mind at rest. I feared for the worst, but now I'm rather looking forward to that collision. Our Milky Way is already a handsome piece of work, but a few puffy edges would be a fabulous final touch. Cosmological feng shui. Just think of that when the weight of the world's problems are getting you down.
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