Physics = pastries

I had come to the conclusion that The Big Bang Theory was making me smarter.

If you’re not watching The Big Bang Theory, then you’re totally missing out on the funniest half-hour of television. My Honey and I have been hooked since the get go and recently got Ava and her family addicted as well. TBS runs the reruns – sometimes as many as four or six episodes in a night.

If you don’t know the show, it centers around three physicists and a mechanical engineer – four smart guys. There is also a pretty neighbor across the hall. I know. Written that way, the show sounds derivative and sorta stupid. You’re going to have to trust me on this. It’s completely laugh out loud hysterical. The show has been nominated for a zillion awards and the actor who plays Sheldon Cooper has won two Emmys and a Golden Globe.

Back to my education. The characters on the show talk all the time about physics and various scientific concepts . It doesn’t matter if you understand it or not while you’re watching. In fact, you’re certainly not supposed to understand. That’s what makes it funny.

So I was reading the Wall Street Journal as I so often do during the course of my day at Bank of No Forks. It takes me several hours because I frequently read all the articles and I only get to do so while my computer is slowly doing mysterious computer stuff or when I’m on hold. I came across an interesting article called, “Physicists Close In on a Universal Puzzle” by Gautam Naik. It’s about work being done at the Large Hadron Collider run by CERN in Geneva.

I’ve read other articles about the Collider before, and I have a very rudimentary understanding of what the Collider was built to do.  The first paragraph mentions the Higgs boson.

Hey, I’ve heard of the Higgs boson before, too. Scientists call it the God Particle. They even mentioned it on The Big Bang Theory. The characters once visited the Collider.

I kept reading. The next bit also mentioned stuff I’d heard on The Big Bang. This encouraged me to read on. I postulated that if I understood those last few paragraphs then I must be getting smarter.

The next paragraphs talked about “subatomic particles” and searching for “statistically significant ‘excesses'”.  Then things got a little dicey. Soon they were discussing the likely mass of the Higgs boson being somewhere around 116 to 130 gigaelectronvolts or GeV.

science cupcakes

I blinked, but soldiered on. Pretty quickly I was lost in theory.

“Under this scenario, the Higgs field permeates the universe, and any particles that interact with it are given a mass through the Higgs boson. The more they interact, the heavier they become.”

Alright, now I’m thinking the Higgs boson is basically cupcakes and I’m a particle interacting with it.

More theory. More lost. All I’m really thinking about now is cupcakes.

By the end when the scientists mention ghost like particles called neutrinos traveling faster than light. Now wait a minute. I recall Einstein having something to say about this. Apparently this development is exciting because it “breaches the cosmic-speed limit.” I’d like to pretend that I saw that coming with my pathetically elementary understanding of E=MC2.

Yeah. The Big Bang isn’t making me smarter and now, thanks to physics, I want a cupcake.