The God Particle by Richard Cox Read Free Book Online

blew and disturbed the illusion.”
    “So it’s an illusion, those clouds. Like your image in the mirror. It looks a lot like you, but it’s not.”
    “So reflections are the fascinating outcome of your job? All that time and effort for reflections?”
    “Not exactly,” Mike says. “But particle physics helps us understand how strange and amazing the world really is. How it could all be considered an illusion of reflections. Everything you see.”
    “Now you’ve lost me.”
    “Okay, let’s get specific, then. When you see something, anything, you’re seeing photons. Little packets of light. They bounce off the tree, strike your retina, and your eye sends an electrochemical signal to your brain, which makes a picture for you. The ‘seeing’ is in your mind, not out in the real world.”
    “But that picture in my head is accurate. I touch the tree and it’s there.”
    “Sure, but what you’re seeing is still just a pattern of reflected photons. Your own little made-up movie. And it’s not a very detailed movie, to be honest. Because right now, all around you, there are photons bouncing all over this airplane cabin. They’re coming through the windows and bouncing off the atoms in my face, which is how you’re able to see me. But you’re only seeing a tiny fraction of them. You aren’t seeing gamma rays, x-rays, you aren’t seeing radio waves. Those are photons, too, with either higher or lower energy. How come you can’t see them? Because our earliest ancestors lived in the sea, and eyes evolved to sense photons that weren’t filtered out by the water. Imagine if that weren’t the case. Imagine what the world would look like if we could detect photons of all energies.”
    “It might look weird to someone who’d never seen it that way before,” Kelly says. “But if that’s how you’d always seen it, it wouldn’t look weird, right?”
    “That’s a very good point,” Mike says.
    “Okay, but the tree is still there. I still don’t see what the big deal is with how my brain chooses to interpret it. I can still touch it.”
    “I just think it’s amazing how much is out there that you don’t see. That to see anything at all, you have to sit around and wait for photons to bounce off something and hit your retina. I think it’s amazing that evolution created mechanisms powerful enough to extract a coherent reality out of the real world of particles bouncing and jiggling all around us. Right now, billions of really tiny particles called neutrinos are passing through you. They’re so tiny they can pass all the way through the Earth without touching another particle. The only way we even know that is because of math, and because of the kind of work done at particle accelerators. Maybe that’s the best example I can give you. That particles of matter, real stuff, are passing through you that you can’t see. It’s reality that you can’t see—because you don’t need to see it. Somehow our bodies can detect certain photons and create a useful picture of the world. Somehow we have tiny little bones in our ears that detect vibrating air molecules—sound waves. It’s amazing.”
    “Amazing?” Kelly asks, a smile finally crossing her lips. She picks up her book again, apparently signaling the end of their discussion. “Or a miracle?”
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    What an idiot he is. What a moron. Manages to strike up a conversation with a gorgeous woman—who happens to be a captive audience—and he ridicules her religious beliefs. Bores her with particle physics. What a brilliant strategist he is.
    Except there shouldn’t be a strategy, should there? You shouldn’t have a plan to meet someone. And even if you do, you can’t shoehorn a mismatch into your life just because she happens to be pretty. Can you? Would you want to?
    On his right, Kelly shuts her book again and abandons it in her lap. “Okay. Explain this Higgs field to me, Mike. Why is it so important?”
    “Well, we have this theory, the