Friday 6th july

Phew, at last they have discovered the Higgs Boson, so now it’s all okay – all those complicated theories work.  Well of course, they haven’t actually discovered the Higgs Boson, just what they think might be evidence of its existence; footprints in the snow, so to speak, or possibly indentations or slight irregularities in the midst of a snowstorm that might indicate that a Higgs Boson has passed this way.  No-one has actually seen a Higgs Boson, let alone sub atomic particles such as electrons and protons, and the even smaller quarks and bosons.  And the models we see in text-books of atoms with their pretty colours and orbiting particles surely do not look like this at all; I suspect that if we could see them they would look quite different.  The hardest thing to comprehend is that everything is made of almost entirely nothing.  Not only the Universe itself, where Galaxies are millions of light years apart, but the few and far between and yet still countless millions of stars and planets are also surrounded by huge spaces filled with nothing.  And these lumps of rock are mostly made of nothing.  Everything we can touch and feel is not substantial at all, but is actually a load of nothing with a few atoms holding it all together.  We are mostly water, but water itself despite the fact that we can smell and feel it is almost entirely composed of nothing.  It is all held together by the power of attraction, and the Higgs Boson apparently gives it mass, which is a fancy word for solidity and weight.  It is as if we are all tiny specks of dust suspended in a huge jelly of nothingness.

I am glad that they have discovered the Higgs Boson, (it would have been an expensive experiment if they hadn’t) but it doesn’t really change anything, it just confirms the current theory. I wonder what physicists of the future will make of us, and our primitive understanding of things.  Will they look back on us, as we do on Copernicus and wonder how on earth they could have been so wrong; Higgs Boson was only the start of it, there were entire Universes inside every Boson still to be explored, and all of those were mostly nothing too.  And when they finally discovered God, he was almost entirely nothing too.  Hahaha