Expat in the Land of Marmite

God Particles and Poodle Perms

TUESDAY: Lunch today features a new Sainsbury's flavour of houmus with roasted red pepper and basil pesto. It's quite nice. I've got it in a whole wheat breadcake from my local bakery with cream cheese and my usual garnish of red pepper/spring onion. It's a slippery sloshy sandwich that, along with my slippery sloshy container of fresh raspberries, cherries, nectarines, and melon, makes for quite a sloppy meal.

This morning my bus was packed to the gills, but I managed to squeeze behind a massive hooded man into the only free seat on the bus, a window seat facing backwards. Like most slightly neurotic people I prefer facing the front and gazing into the future rather than watching the past slip by. But today, as we spent a very long time stopped at the next bus stop, I had a perfect view right into my local neighbourhood dog grooming shop. I watched as the groomer clipped a large curly dog, rendering its hairs into the past as a small terrier watched disapprovingly from an adjacent cage. From my view through the door I could see part of the price list on the wall, with an entire menu for Poodles, one for Spaniels, one for Collies, and one listing miscellaneous breeds. And I smiled happily when I realised that being the only rear-facing passenger on that side of the bus, I was privileged to have my own private viewing experience.

WEDNESDAY: Lunch is odd: a marriage of not enough haloumi for a sandwich with not enough mature cheddar for a sandwich. Like Marmite and peanut butter they go surprisingly well together.

Last week I hungrily devoured the Guardian's supplement about the LHC or Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator at Cern which is due to be turned on later this summer and will hopefully, by colliding two counter rotating beams of protons, recreate the conditions and energies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. I suppose I'm a bit more excited about this than most of my friends and workmates, but I do have a strong interest in physics. Although my love of mathematics when I was young was stalled a bit in high school by an extremely boring teacher whose Texas monotone took all the fun out of trigonometry, I still love to read about physics and maths from a laywoman's point of view.

Ten years ago I became so enamoured with chaos theory that I read probably 10 books in a row on the subject, branching off into complexity and symmetry breaking, and then I wrote a novel based on the butterfly effect and my idea of fractal time. So this huge, massively expensive particle accelerator -- which has the potential to answer many of the greatest questions of physics, not to mention philosophy -- excites me in a way I can't describe without becoming just a bit obscene.

One of the questions it is hoped the LHC will answer is if the Higgs boson, aka the God Particle, actually exists. It is theorized that this subatomic particle is responsible for mass. So if it is discovered that the Higgs boson doesn't exist, does that mean we're all figments of our imaginations? And although Michio Kaku, author and professor of theoretical physics, explains that any potential black holes created by the collider will be so minute they will dissipate instantly, why are so many people fearful that he could be wrong? I mean, if a black hole were created that was big enough to swallow the universe, as some sceptics fear, would it really matter? We'd never know the difference, would we? Have you ever been swallowed by a black hole? Me neither. I wouldn't think it would hurt much. And I think my lifelong California-born fear of being on the toilet when the Big Earthquake strikes just wouldn't come into account.

Another theory the LHC is hoped to prove or disprove is string theory, which proposes that the physical universe is based not in 4 dimensions of Space-time but in 10 dimensions. This worries me a bit, as I've been very excited about string theory ever since I first read about it. In fact, in one of my coffee columns I suggested my Ball of Superstring Theory based on the fact that cats seem to perceive matter in not only more than 3 physical dimensions but in several differently timed dimensions as well. To me this is the obvious explanation of why cats seem to have so much fun. And if string theory is disproved, life just won't seem nearly as entertaining.

On the other hand, how will they go about proving or disproving string theory? Do they need a bunch of cats watching the results? In the £2.6 billion budget for the LHC, I certainly hope they've allowed for enough catnip.

13.7.08 12:54