Day 2: Undeniable

I read today about the nobel prize awarded to two physicists who, in 1964, discovered the likely existence (there was no physical proof of it then) of a particle they believed responsible for conferring mass upon other objects.  Something about imagining it as a particle moving through a molasses-like space, pulling things along with it, something else about electroweak forces.  One commentor in the NY Times article suggested it could be helpful to think of it as a bill attempting to pass through Congress, growing more "ponderous" and "bloated" as it traveled.   Ha!  Bemoaning my own lack of conceptual knowledge, or understanding, really, I read with wide-eyed amazement.  It was the infamous "God particle,"  the Higgs Boson.  Over the next 40 years or so 10,000 scientist attempted to prove the existence of the boson.  And they did, using the Hadron collidor.  I marvel at things like this:  the effort, the belief, the math, the imagination, the yearning to understand that it takes to accomplish such a fundamental understanding of our universe, something that brings us closer to knowing ourselves, to understanding the elegance of the worlds' complexity. 

I remember seeing Tom Stoppard's play, "Arcadia" for the first time in High School, becoming obsessed with it.  Obsessed with the idea of entropy, and later, as an older student reading the play, obsessed with how the complexity and perfection of the writing mirrored the complexity and perfection of the young Thomasina, a mathematical genius in love with her tutor.  I can't help, as I get older and more ponderous myself, see this blurring of science and emotions and explanations of beauty, or "symmetry", as we try to explain it all with math or with vocabulary, I can't help but see it as part of something else that needs explanation.  Can we explain our need to know, our desire to create?  This is the work of poets, but it is also the work of physicists.  In the end, we need so many languages to explain our existence.  And I am glad to be in awe today.