Miller Analogy Restored

W mounts his pony by standing on British Prime Minister

Correction: The Miller Analogy Restored

            The Rocket City Blues Department of Science and Technology Reportage has received a somewhat testy objection to July 2’s column on this blog,  “Higgs Boson Particle is Justin Bieber,“ where we reported that as per Professor Miller’s theory—or “The Miller Analogy”--the Higgs Boson Particle could be understood as Justin Bieber at a cocktail party getting moshed by groupies who appear to gather mass but we don’t know for sure because we were not invited.  Our correspondent acknowledged that he had, with “the best intentions,” sort of “sexed up” the Miller Analogy by substituting Justin Bieber--in fact born too late to be at the cocktail party--for “the former Prime Minister” of Great Britain, who is claimed to have been in Professor Miller’s original version.  While confessing the liberty he took with Professor Miller, the writer adds a claim for the “essential legitimacy” of his amended “Miller Analogy” for how the Higgs Boson Field works.

            At Rocket City Blues we are almost unanimous in our conviction that truth in science reporting is worth considering, and so we replace the sexed-up and errant “Miller Analogy,” pretty good but maybe “Miller Light,” with a restored Standard Model Miller Analogy:

Imagine you are on a balcony looking down at a cocktail party and you see an  amiable upper-class English twit following right behind  George W. Bush, the former American president who walks this way and that through the cocktail party, swinging his arms in an exaggerated fashion and spreading his hands out so he will look like a big man. Now, after you see how closely the amiable twit follows as W wanders about trying to find where he is supposed to be, follows W so closely you think his knees might be glued to W’s ass, you realize suddenly that this follower of W is not as you first thought, a gluon, a subatomic massless particle, but rather Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of Britain. And so, remembering that appearances are not quite enough in physics, you shift your paradigm, so to speak, and you see that what you took to be gluon is in fact Tony Blair and also the Higgs Boson particle at the same time, admittedly for reasons that are not quite apparent to anyone except perhaps Professor Miller.

In any case, suddenly Tony Blair the Bosun seizes W by the shoulders and tries to steer him toward the banquet table where massness is being served up. But W is massless, so, like a pingpong ball and a microsopic speck of dust on a ping pong table with something sticky on it, Tony Blair and W are simply stuck together and glued in place. But then there is a sudden commotion. A flash. A kaboom. And a country in the Middle East, not the one that was already smacked but another we were not quite expecting, is blown to fucking smithereens. Totally.  Up on the balcony, you say to yourself, “Did I just see that, or what?”

This is physics. This is how everything works.

Higgs Boson is Actually Justin Bieber

Flash Update: Higgs Boson is Actually

 Justin Bieber at a Party in 1993!

A special report just released on the Internet has brought much needed clarity and elegance –and, to be sure, a tad more controversy—to Physics’ answer to the question, “Just what is the Higgs Boson?” Under the header “Analogies, please!” the web essay identifies the explanation fostered in 1993 by Professor David Miller, a physicist at University College London—a pretty good place, if not quite Oxbridge. Anyway, Professor Miller’s metaphor—technically a ‘conceit,’ or extended metaphor, as English majors know-- is as follows (and you should follow it closely or you will miss the Higgs boson altogether):

“Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. You’re already hammered on wine-in-a-box and sort of depressed because you’re a physicist and probably won’t get hooked up here or anywhere else until maybe July 4, 2012 when at least for a while everybody will think theoretical physics is really hot. Well, to get back to the analogy, just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. In fact, nobody gives a shit about them because they are plain. The party crowd don’t even see them. They are, like, invisible. But when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move … and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.  The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like massless particles, and Bieber is, like, this year’s toy boy for fifteen-year-old girls but also like a massive Z boson. Although, actually he is kind of slight. In fact, a skinny guy who is sort of short.”

Now, this metaphoric analogy is useful because it makes you feel like you are at the cosmic cocktail party, somewhat. However, you’re actually still up on the balcony, so you are pretty much out of it, so to speak, and that brings up a kind of quantum problem that maybe Professor Miller forgot about for a little bit just when he was making up his metaphor. The quantum problem is, How can you know what is going on down there without actually milling around the toy boy with the groupies? And, if Justin Bieber is so mobbed up he can hardly move, you won’t really know jack  about what is actually happening, and you will truly want  simply to get the fuck out of there.  And there is another problem. A big problem. Justin Bieber was born in 1994, a year after the Miller Analogy was released on the normals, the just plain folks, so  just how could he be down there getting mobbed at the cocktail party? Is this because time is plastic? Professor Miller isn’t saying.

So, Professor Miller’s metaphor has some problems. But not to give up on explaining the Higgs Boson particle to just plain folks like you and me and the others who are wondering about why they came to this particular party and why they are massless, the Manchester Guardian’s science reporter Ian Sample (seriously, that’s his name), gives us yet another metaphor for what seems to be happening:

“Imagine a tray with ping-pong balls scattered on it. The balls roll freely around the empty tray. But then, if you spread a layer of sugar over the tray, the balls sitting on the piled-up sugar don’t roll so easily. In fact, if it were hot, they would get stuck, but that’s another problem. You don’t want your balls stuck on any tray, do you? So anyway, the grains of sugar introduce a kind of inertial ‘drag,’ kind of like my prose style at this point, and that’s the kind of effect that the Higgs field supposedly has on particles with mass.”

This is pretty good. It’s sweet, with the sugar, and also fun because generally people have a positive concept of ping-pong balls. However, hardly anybody but maybe particle physicists play ping-pong anymore, and when they do it is generally in a garage with some skanky smells and spidery tools laying around and the idea of sugar clotting up on the table isn’t helping things at all. And you know as well as I do that the net is sagging or busted and at least one of the two paddles, if you’re lucky enough to have two, has no handle. So I don’t come away from this very keen on Higgs and his particle. I’d just as soon play beer pong on the table, if you want to know.

It seems we keep getting clogged up, clotted, and stuck, but if you want any more information on the Cry for Analogies, here is the site:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12547980-the-higgs-boson-made-simple

Also, Google Images just possibly  might have an image of Justin Bieber as a zygote in 1993. Somebody needs to fact check the dates.