SOME BIG STUPID QUESTIONS

I should think that it ought to be pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever visited these pages over the last couple of years, and indeed, anyone who’s ever actually met me, that I am no scientist and I’m certainly no mathematician. Whilst I can still do a number of fairly difficult equations in my head to calculate percentages and angles and how much my shopping is going to come out at, the language of equations tends to be fairly meaningless to me unless someone is going through it all very slowly, and even then I’m just as likely to forget most of the process just as soon as the kettle boils, and the energy added to the molecules of the water has agitated them just enough for them to reach the critical moment of the state of change that usually occurs at or around one hundred degrees centigrade mark, give or take a few variables.

Given that I trained in the arts, I suppose that’s really not all that surprising. After all, despite everything, I still meet people who presume that art is what the “stupid” kids did at school instead of learning the real and important stuff. Art teachers still get tarred with much the same brush too, as I found recently as I bristled my way to work after a minister talking about raising the educational standards of teachers made a point of stressing that “…even art teachers…” would need these capabilities in future.

Imbecile! I wonder who taught him…? Some of the wisest and cleverest people I’ve ever known were art teachers…

Mind you, I’ve never been all that brilliant at the arts, either. My paintings were always “adequate” and I’ve been “good enough” to get by in my career. I was once considered “well-read” although it turns out that I’ve read little that is considered “worthy”. My writing borders upon the turgid and is, at best, derivative. Nowadays I find anyone “gushing” on about the process of acting positively sets my teeth on edge, and my philosophy tends to be little deeper than to be of the “I reckon” variety that I find so tiresome in the rest of the world these days.

I am, when it all boils down to it, a bit of an ignorant philistine.

I mention all of this because I had a flash of inspiration a few days ago, forged, no doubt in the big bang of my own misunderstandings. A few simple thoughts based upon the woolliest of understandings of a few scientific ideas gleaned from one or two documentaries on BBC4 that most real scientists and thinkers would obviously dismiss as the random ravings of an idiot.

But, nevertheless, they kind of made sense to me, which probably says a lot.

Now, because of the circles I fail to move in, I’m unlikely to ever actually get the chance to sit down with an actual genuine scientist and ask these questions, or make these points, so instead, I’m just going to tap them out here and leave them festering as little puzzles for whoever might happen to come across them one day as they’re idly pottering around unable to sleep on the night before they get their Nobel prize…

I kind of understand, for example, that for the super-symmetry model to work in a perfect universe, there would be no room for life to exist because the symmetry of the mass, the energy and the forces would immediately be cancelled out by the anti-mass, the anti-energy and the anti-forces, and that that’s where the Higgs field comes into play, but does that really mean that all of the stuff that we can see in the universe is only the result of the errors in the system….?

That life itself is the “butterfly wing” causing our chaotic universe…?

Perhaps this means that there is no other life out there after all, because the rest of the universe is in harmony and it’s just the presence of things like the Earth itself that is the fly in the ointment… We just can’t see the bigger picture because we’re sitting here upon what is ostensibly the problem, hurtling through eternity on a rocky error, and contributing to some kind of huge cosmic joke whilst looking back at the results of the mistake, trying to find answers to which we ourselves are the problem.

Or maybe it’s just the galaxies and stars and planets collectively that are the errors. The very things that we are looking at are the mistakes and the things that are most removed from the mean, and we should be pointing all of our telescopes at the spaces in between them if we really want to know what’s actually going on.

The thing about super-symmetry appears to be that, in the words of that old Sammy Cahn lyric “You can’t have one without the other” and so the absence of one, always means the absence of both, so that the search for the Higgs seems to involve looking for not one but two unlikely events occurring at precisely the same time, and also looking for two things that ought not to be happening at all if the system was perfectly in balance.

Basically, it seems to me that, not only have I once again displayed my massive ignorance about the whole subject when I really ought to be just shutting up and keeping quiet about things that I really don’t understand (Ah! Once again my entire childhood flashes before my eyes…) but also that if I understand it correctly, then the entire universe and our place within it is all a bit of a mistake and, suddenly, a great deal of things start to make a lot of sense.