The Question

I saw something on History Channel that frankly caused me to stop dead. That doesn't happen a lot. The fact that something incredibly tiny stopped me, just goes to show.

Yes, today's post is heading in the opposite direction from outer space. The subject is the Higgs-Boson particle. As we know, this is the infamous God Particle. It is supposed to provide the attribute of mass to everything else in the universe. I know I've expressed some doubt about this in the past and this new info just makes things more confusing.

It's said that an atom is both a particle AND a wave. That still sounds like something you spread in the garden to promote plant growth. However, when scientists tried to get close enough to see what's going on, they failed. Why? Because the darn atom disappeared ! Plain and simple disappeared. Much like the slightly less famous Snark, the place where the atom under study was supposed to be was empty. And yet, when they tried firing an electron at the spot, it showed something. I would love to integrate what happened into some kind of picture of the basic structure of matter. It resisted. In fact, what showed up was a diffraction pattern on the target behind the atom. That argues for some kind solid structure inside the atom. But we can't actually see any such structure, because we can't even see the atom! AND, the fired "particle", while it obviously interacted with something in the general locus of where they thought it was, didn't hit anything on the way through. It's path was affected, yet the result wasn't that of a single particle of anything hitting anything. No, instead, it was that of a transmissive wave[1] moving past a a refraction grid.

[1] a transmissive wave is a wave that moves "matter" along with a waveform. (Like water does)

Let's summarize:

Matter is made up of atoms.
Atoms were considered solid particles.
When looked at, it becomes obvious that atoms are not matter as we thought.
Atoms aren't there, but they interact with "particles" in some manner.
Atoms create refraction patterns when "particles" pass through them.

This reads like sheer nonsense. It leaves entirely open the question of what it is that isn't there, yet interacts with things. And, if atoms aren't there, how do we manage to do things that seem like we're doing? If atoms aren't there, how do we operate a particle collider? Or set off an atom bomb? Where's the fizz in fission? How do we walk across the street???

We have accepted that matter and energy are the same (right?). We run atom bombs on that premise. Now we have to try to find out what we're doing when we do it. If the atom is some kind of energy matrix, then there is no such thing as solid matter!!!

Sorry I  had to let you have that one right between the eyes, but there isn't any honest way to soften the blow. And a huge chunk of physics and science in general just went up in a puff of non-smoke. I guess we can continue to call what we thought we had "matter". We need a tag and this one isn't attached to anything.

Something is making matter matter! If matter is real, perhaps an atom is a set of standing waveforms that is static and stable, although it can be modified via physics or chemistry. Where this leaves quarks, electrons, neutrons, and protons, I don't know. It's clear that we can't really see them either. And what about the small and large atomic forces? Where do they fit in? Do we think that a Higgs-Boson is also an energy waveform/matrix that parks itself in the matrix of the atom and somehow makes it 3-dimensional so that it can hang itself on the fabric of space? Or maybe the H-B connects the "atom" to space so that it can be moved. Then we could say that inertia is the resistance of the "atom" to being moved elsewhere away from the spot where it was hanging. Is gravity simply an electromagnetic effect that happens because the charge on the Boson wants to fill empty space in the matrix that surrounds it? Or is it something different now?

As you can tell, this discovery is a mite more impactful than any other discovery in A While. It's going to change our entire view of the universe and literally everything in it. We know a great many things work, but we now have no idea WHY. This brings up the minor question of why this news isn't being screamed from rooftops, but the main news item makes everything else inconsequential.

I hope that someone can come along to straighten things out. I don't like feeling that I could disappear at any moment. Perhaps, like Peter Pan, we can think happy thoughts and fly around the room while wait for an answer. At this point, there's no apparent reason we can't. As Waldo said, "Nothing is certain! Magic is everywhere!".