Small Black Holes

No doubt, you have been waiting anxiously for the successful conclusion to search for the elusive Higgs boson. Ever since Higgs speculated on the existence of the boson back in 1964, I have been waiting for the proof of its existence. Irreverent science writers dubbed the boson ‘the God particle’ since it seemed not to exist but in Higgs’ theory, it must.

10 billion dollars later, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, is ready to run the experiment to find a boson. A number of attempts using particle accelerators in different parts of the world have attempted to find the boson, but they have come up empty-handed. This is should not have been unexpected since the boson, by definition, has no mass.

Without spending even ten dollars, let alone 10 billion dollars, I have been carrying out my own search for the boson. My wife misheard me when I was muttering about the missing particle thinking I was saying bosom and called me a dirty old man. Which, as spin-off of my experiment, I am not. Each morning, right after I shower, I step on the bathroom scale to check for bosons.

Some of you no doubt have noted the effect of particles when you weigh yourself from day to day. One day your weight will be up half a kilogram; the next day you will be down half a kilogram. It is the bosons.

Bosons have no mass but when they pass through other particles, they increase the mass of those particles. Think of bosons as the beer you had yesterday. For some reason, a bottle of beer passing through your body will increase your mass even though you visit the washroom twice during the night. I imbibed several cases of light beer trying to capture a boson, but alas, the beer bosons pass right through my body, pausing only long enough to increase the mass of said body. One would think that the brewers would load up their light beer with photons, since these particles have no mass. However, like the boson, they are hard to catch.

Another of these elusive particles is the quark but I gave up my search for quarks when they built the neutrino lab in Sudbury. No sense in competing with our neighbours. My search focussed on the weightier particles – ones I could identify in my lavatory laboratory. The W and Z particles, 100 times heavier than the hydrogen atom, were the prime suspects in my weight fluctuations, and these were the results of Higgs’ boson collisions. My quest is now to see if limiting the amount of W and Z particles in my diet, so the bosons which are, according to the scientists, zipping all about us, colliding and making things (me) heavy, will work for me. Unfortunately, the Canada Food Guide does require W and Z particles to be identified on our packaging. Yet.

This is all very interesting but you may be thinking that it does not matter much to you if the collision of clouds of protons produce proof of the boson or not. What these mad scientists have not told you is that there is a small chance that when the protons collide at near the speed of light, they may produce small black holes. This should concern you.

If you have read any science fiction or watched Star Trek, you know that black holes are very dangerous things. Get sucked into a black hole and you may come out the other side as small as some W or Z particle, compressed by the intense gravity of the black hole. Astronomers are certain they have seen black holes in space – those dark spots in the sky were no light shines. These black holes can be very large, capable of swallowing up small stars, let alone a Star Ship like the Enterprise. Small black holes can be just as dangerous.

We have all seen a very common, yet unexplained, phenomena that appeared about the time that first particle accelerator began trying to isolate small particles. It was not serendipity that spin washing machines came on the market shortly before the first particle accelerator was built. Scientists observed that small socks would mysteriously disappear from these machines when they spun at high speed. Cockcroft and Walton, who had been trying to accelerate protons down a straight line, soon caught onto the circular idea and it was not long before the straight-line acceleration experiment was changed to the circular model. What they ignored in their hurry to collide protons was the black hole phenomena created by these machines.

Next month in Geneva, the world’s largest accelerator will start experiments to find the boson. They will also begin to create larger black holes. No longer will single socks disappear from the face of the earth, but larger articles will suddenly disappear, lost forever as they are transformed by the intense gravity. Socks may reappear as W and Z particles somewhere in space. Cats, dogs and umbrellas may be small enough to be sucked into these new small black holes created by the large electron positron collider halfway across the world. You may be well advised to keep small children indoors beginning September 10, not leaving them unattended until the experiments end in November.

In the meantime, I am working on a special oil that will deflect bosons and thus keep my weight down. I have added a secret ingredient to those lotions that stop ultra violet rays and I am certain it will be as financially successful as suntan lotion. ‘Boff’ Boson Repellent will be on the market as soon as I get the smell under control. The beta version repelled bosoms, so I know I am getting close to a breakthrough.