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.

Hooray for Higgs

Hip Hip Hooray Hooray Hooray for Higgs!

            All best wishes, gratitude, and veneration for Peter Higgs, whose “Higgs Boson Field Theory” has been affirmed.  

It is especially moving that Higgs should be British, a man of an era that saw British culture’s very life nearly crushed for the second time in half a century by German aggression and that saw Britain’s superb schools and research universities savaged by Thatcherism.  

As the clip noted below may begin to suggest, he is the Standard Model of the sort of modesty, humor, and patience that enabled him to live with grace into his 80s and see his intellectual imagination wonderfully vindicated. Like Newton a hero of his times, he’s helped make everything so very much more interesting.

http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/life-boson

In honor of Peter Higgs and the enormous gang of colleagues who found his boson, Saturday, July 7, is

INTERNATIONAL KISS A PHYSICIST DAY!

Watch for a special post on How to Spot a Physicist.

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.

Higgs Boson Lost

Flash. For Immediate release:

Higgs Boson Particle “Now Totally Lost “Beneath Metaphorical Language of Physicists Attempting to Speak to Normals

            BBC news reports that Sir Bendix Sprott of Worthingham College, Cambridge, has formally announced this afternoon that the much sought Higgs Boson Particle was recently found but is now “totally and irrevocably lost” beneath a “shite-load of metaphors” that has burst forth this month from the world’s high energy physicists.

            Known since Newton for their determination to be the only academics who communicate with sufficient caution, clarity and meticulous care to avoid entirely what Professor Sprott referred to as “untruth and twoddle,” this scientific community has surprised intellectuals everywhere by abandoning sense for extravagant and surprisingly stupid metaphor.

            Professor Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and scientist, commenting today on what has immediately been termed the “Sprott Effect,” said in an interview on the PBS science program, “Pop Smarts,” that “it all started with the fucking ‘boson’. I mean, just a moronic figure of speech from the start, complete with his bellbottoms, his stupid little sailor hat, and his fucking whistle.  Why, “ Professor Chomsky added, “why can’t we fucking  say what we fucking mean? It’s not a fucking play or a fucking movie, after all, it’s the fucking universe. What did the fucking little boson do, whistle up the whole fucking universe with his fucking little whistle? Why not the fucking Higgs Irish cop? Why not the fucking Higgs crossing guard?”

            Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the International Association of Physicists, speaking on condition of anonymity, has cautioned that the so-called “Sprott Effect” might be “a tempest in a tea pot, so to say,” and that “we should all be cautious and reserved as the boson steps forth on deck, “ lest he “change his mind, as he is wont to do, and sails away upon seas we have as yet not even imagined, let alone mapped, seas with tides, to be sure, even though we haven’t seen them, and maybe won’t ever see them, since we don’t have the maps—at least not yet—so we don’t know which way to sail, or, for that matter, whether we have a sail, or maybe we just think we do because, well, it’s standard, right?”        

           Still, some high energy physicists have not been so constrained, including one Oxford-based CERN investigator who has written that the cosmos in the soon-to-be revealed new, new  Standard Theory (or in brief the “New-New”) will “in effect” be “a ubiquitous Higgs snowfield that affects other particles traveling through it depending on whether they are wearing, metaphorically speaking, skis, snowshoes or just shoes.”  And John Ellis, professor of theoretical physics at King’s College London and guest professor at CERN, has confidently remarked, “Higgs has no place to hide.” Asked whether he was referring to Professor Higgs, who first invited his colleagues to imagine a “particle that would tells us why there is less nothing than something or the little “boson” himself, Professor Ellis simply appeared dumbfounded by the question, only muttering again, “Higgs has nowhere to hide.”

            To be sure, Professor John Guinon, a longtime physics professor at the University of California at Davis and author of “The Higgs Hunter’s Guide,” said on Tuesday somewhat more helpfully, “If the calculations are indeed correct—and we are, thousands of us, picking over the heap with care—then it is fair to say that in some sense we have reached the mountaintop.” Asked after his address at a symposium in Davis whether he meant to say that Higgs was, as Professor Ellis had said, “hiding”, perhaps “on the mountaintop,” perhaps himself in snowshoes or in the flipflops he customarily wears, in some sense, Professor Guinon also appeared to be momentarily confused. Some suggested that there was a touch of panic in Guinon’s eyes, as though, perhaps, he was expecting a follow-up question as to why, if Higgs was hiding on the mountaintop all along, the hunters had not simply gone up there and found him.  But symposium moderator Gregorio Bernardi of the University of Paris and researcher at Fermilab, defused an uncomfortable moment by interjecting that there are “strong indications of the production and decay of Higgs bosoms” [sic] and that “It’s a real cliffhanger”, thus appearing to support Guinon’s suggestion that Higgs, or the bosons perhaps, were indeed hiding, or fruitlessly trying to hide, from the hunters on the mountain, but were not so much on the top as hanging over a cliff near the top.

            This morning a measure of clarity was finally achieved when a spokesman for high energy physicists released on condition of anonymity the claim that “a sort of cosmic molasses pervading space is what gives particles their heft. Particles trying to wade through it gather mass the way a bill moving through congress gains riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous.” To be sure, a journalist was heard to say following the release of this sentence (or more precisely this sentence and a dependent fragmentary clause) that it “had all the heft and ponderousness of a steaming bison turd” and that anyone who wrote it should have been “tossed out of the ninth grade on his ass. “ But the total absence of comment from the scientific community suggests a basic satisfaction with the molasses, so to speak.

Finally, as global science quivers with anticipation like a bowl of chocolate pudding when it has not quite firmed up and you are trying to jam it into the second shelf of the refrigerator but it does not quite fit and you are thinking, fuck all, maybe I should eat it now but you are not sure, we do well to remember the words of Sir Arnold Giblet, author of the standard biography of Sir Isaac Newton, the great English father of physics: “Right, so, the apple hit him in the head. Right? That’s just bullshit. They made it up to make it clear. It’s bullshit. Never happened.”

Exploring the Fucking Cosmos

Local Scientist Reveals Big Bang in Fact a Slow, Tantric Grind