The God Particle (4 page)

“Oh, the usual. Entry-level work in a small market. Kept moving around, working my way up.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“It’s a tough business. You have to develop thick skin. But you also have to really like it—telling stories, finding the truth.”

The conversation stalls as Mike searches for something else to ask, more polite questions that won’t stray too quickly into personal territory.

“So you’re a physicist?” she asks.

“Is it that obvious? I left the pocket protector at home and everything.”

Kelly laughs. “No, I’ve actually seen you on television before.”

“You have?”

“At the station we have feeds, stuff that comes down by video from other ABC affiliates. And CNN affiliates. Anything from war footage in the Middle East to press conferences about super colliders on the Texas prairie.”

Mike just stares at her for a moment, her admission wholly unexpected.

“Super colliders
under
the Texas prairie,” he finally says. “The ring and detectors are underground.”

“Is your office underground?”

“No. I even have a window.”

“I would hope so, since you run the thing.”

“Well, I’m in charge of our primary project, but Landon Donovan runs the place. You must know about him, too.”

“Yeah. He picked up the pieces from the first one, the project the government started in Waxahachie. That one was killed by Congress a while back, right? Because of budget cuts?”

Mike finds it difficult to believe that she already knew who he was. Surprised that she listened closely enough to stories about the super collider to have this conversation with him.

And the dark outline of her mascara. Lips the color of California redwood.

“Landon and his investors,” he tells her, “tried to buy the land that had been allotted for the original super collider, because much of the underground tunnel had already been dug. But there were too many owners and not enough cooperation. The reason the project stayed nearby is because of the cheap land, and because one of the largest investors is from Texas. All the biggest things are required to be in Texas, you know.”

“Who is this investor?”

“I don’t actually know. Landon is our chief executive, but the rest of the ownership has chosen to remain anonymous.”

“So what do you do there, exactly?”

“On my project we’re looking for a particle that was first theorized by Peter Higgs.”

“That’s right. The God particle.”

Dopamine levels in his brain must be soaring, he is so giddy and confident. “You know about that, too?”

“Well, in my job it pays to actually
comprehend
what comes down on the feeds.”

“Rather than just watch our press conferences to check out all the good-looking physicists?”

Kelly grins. “So why do they call it the God particle?”

“A famous physicist, Leon Lederman, he came up with the name. See, we have this theory to describe the particles of matter and energy that make up the universe. It’s called the Standard Model. But for it to work the way we think, it’s got to have this field—the Higgs field—and our machine is supposed to be able to find it. The Higgs field is special because we think it played a role in the universe forming the way it did. I guess Lederman was trying to be melodramatic.”

“What made you want to study physics?”

“Curiosity, I guess. I’ve always been interested in understanding how things work. As a kid it was mechanical things, like my bicycle or an automobile engine. Now my job is to figure out how a much, much bigger machine works—the whole universe.”

Kelly, who has been holding her place in
Huckleberry Finn
since they began talking, replaces her hand with a bookmark. She sets the volume aside and turns further toward Mike. Opening herself to him. A small confirmation of the larger-scale theory.

“So I take it you’re not a particularly religious person?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you called the universe a machine. I tend to think of it more as a miracle.”

“Oh, it’s a miracle all right. Just the sheer size of the thing is a concept beyond anything you or I could comprehend. And when you think of the interaction of all those particles and energy, and gravity collapsing matter into stars, and some of those stars exploding, ejecting heavier elements that eventually end up as planets orbiting stars, including at least one that somehow produced an organism complex enough to ask questions of the universe that spawned it—hell, I don’t know if ‘miracle’ is a big enough word to describe something like that.”

“That’s an interesting point of view,” Kelly says. “But all that randomness, all those accidents . . . doesn’t that seem a little—I don’t know—coincidental to you?”

“It can. But when you think about how long the universe has been around, and how big it is—probability indicates that even the most unlikely events should occur sometime.”

“You think?”

“Yep. There’s even math to back me up on that.”

“But who says the math is right?”

“Well, if you do work like mine, if you want to perform experiments to test theories with observation, it helps to pay attention to what works. Math works. Physics theories work.”

“Like?”

“Like anything. Computers, televisions, cell phones. This plane we’re flying in.”

“Okay, practical inventions are one thing. But take Einstein, for instance. I know he was brilliant, but what was so special about him compared to other scientists?”

“Einstein? He pretty much single-handedly brought us out of the darkness and into the light. He imagined reality in a completely different way, and with beautiful simplicity. He showed how matter—like your skin—and energy—like the light coming through the window—are really the same thing. With that, we were able to harness nuclear power—”

“Oh, that’s a compelling argument for the math,” Kelly says. “Albert sits in his office and thinks up E=mc
²
and now we can blow up the world.”

“Okay, but the same general idea explains how the sun works. We all like the sun, right?”

“But do we really need to know how it works? A lot of people are comfortable with ‘Let there be light.’ ”

“Well, okay,” Mike says. “I mean, you can’t argue with another person’s beliefs.”

“But you can choose not to respect them. Isn’t that right?”

It really is remarkable, this conversation he’s having with her. Most of the time, when people unfamiliar with physics ask questions about his work, or about scientific principles in general, they smile and nod at his answers. They say things like “Wow” or “Cool,” and certainly don’t try to challenge him. But he’d rather not veer into spirituality. Comparing religion and science is an obstacle course he’s never cared to navigate.

“If you believe something,” he says finally, “how can I not respect it?”

Kelly chuckles. “Nice answer, Senator.”

“So why don’t we talk about
your
job, then? Like, I’ve always wondered how folks like you deal with reaction from the public. I imagine a lot of people have strong opinions about the newscasts, since they watch them every day.”

“Oh, you can’t believe all the calls we get at the station. The stories they don’t like, the clothes we wear, my makeup, errant weather forecasts, you name it. E-mails and letters, too. Most people are nice, but a lot aren’t.”

“Do you mind that part of it?”

“I used to let it bother me, but you have to be tough. Especially in a large market like Dallas.”

“Where do you go from there? What’s the career path?”

“I’d like to get a network position at some point. Report for a major news magazine. Take Katie Couric’s place.”

Mike chuckles as the moment floats between them. He notices she’s not wearing a wedding ring. He could ask for her phone number now, permission to call her sometime, but those words have no clear idea how to find their way out of his mouth.

“Anyway,” Kelly says, “I’m not going to let you change the subject.”

“The subject?”

“About how your views are logical and provable while others are subjective and have no facts to support them.”

He hopes she’s joking. “But isn’t that the very definition of faith? To accept without proof?”

“Sure,” Kelly says. “But in your line of work, there’s nothing holier than verifiable proof, right?”

“Right.”

“Does that mean we’re at an impasse?”

“No,” Mike says, without really thinking about his answer.

“No?” she prods.

“Well, the standard answer, the one spiritual scientists like to use, is that no matter how well we explain the mechanics of the universe, someone had to put it there. Even with new ideas that suggest the Big Bang might not have been ‘the beginning,’ or the idea of the universe arising out of random quantum fluctuations, we still long to describe a mechanism in which existence moved from a state of nothing to a state of something. For a lot of people, that’s where God enters the picture.”

“Rather than with the book of Genesis?”

“Look,” Mike says. “I don’t want to contradict something that you hold—”

“Hey,” Kelly interrupts. She reaches forward and touches his arm. “I’m a big girl. I’m asking you because I want to hear your perspective.”

At the mercy of chemical response, Mike grins like a fool. “Why?”

“Because you obviously know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, thanks. But I don’t have any idea if what I think is correct. There’s always the possibility that God created a universe that appears to work a certain way, but doesn’t. Or that he set up the rules and part of the game is for us to discover them.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“Well, many creation stories were written before man had discovered things about the universe that seem self-evident today. To interpret them literally is to believe, for instance, that the Earth is the center of the universe, that the greater and lesser lights are there to create day and night for us. But today we know the Earth orbits the sun, and we know the moon isn’t a light at all. It’s a big rock that reflects light from the sun.”

Kelly doesn’t say anything.

“It’s just . . . if you knew how vast the universe is, how truly amazing it is that people like Einstein could predict how things would work with the tools of mathematics, that he could compose equations that would take years to verify with experiments, and that those experiments would prove with undeniable accuracy that he was right. . . . Everything we think as scientists, every idea we come up with, we expend enormous effort trying to tear it down. Only the most robust concepts survive. Compare that to ancient texts, stories and fables that contain so many contradictions, that seem to be influenced by faulty assumptions and observations, stories handed down by word of mouth for generations before someone finally decided to write them down. And then they were transcribed however many times, and translated, and. . . .”

“And what?”

“You know what I think is the most fascinating outcome of particle physics? The realization that our physical world is so different from the way we perceive it. You see a tree beside a lake under a blue sky, and you have a pretty good idea what you’re looking at, right? There is a sense of familiarity as your brain compares this image to previous, similar images. There could be an emotional component to that memory. ‘I like the lake. The best times with my family were at Tahoe.’ That sort of thing.

“Now, if I were to ask which of those ideas are real and which are filtered through your perception, what would you say?”

Kelly thinks for a minute. Her smile has long since disappeared. He’s probably gone too far, but there’s no turning back now.

“Well, the lake is there. The sky, the tree. But my memories, the emotional impact, that’s obviously something I’m assigning to the image that isn’t actually there.”

“Right,” Mike says. “At least that’s the traditional way to look at the world. But there are other ways to look at it. A philosopher could say there is no verifiable proof the tree is there. He could say that you’re making an assumption about the tree’s existence based on data from your eyes, but who says your eyes can be trusted? Or your brain? How do you know you aren’t hallucinating the tree? It happens to people every day—sick people, users of hallucinogenic drugs, once in a while people just like you and me. Until you touch the tree, maybe it really isn’t there.”

“Okay, say I touch it. Then what?”

“Then obviously
something
is there, right? Assuming you’re a real person, that you believe your sense of touch, then it’s obvious something is there. But what, exactly? Think of the reflection on the lake. You see the sky, clouds. If you’d never seen water before, would you think there were clouds in the water?”

“Sure. Until the wind 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.”