Tripp, WTF??!!!

Yup, that was my wife's reaction to telling her about my planned  trip to CERN.  It was a bombshell, for sure, and she actually handled it very well, and she certainly did not use explicit language, and I am grateful for all of that.  I really am.  And I know she doesn't like to hear my 'explanations,' which to her are rationalizations, and I love the fact that I have her to point that out to me, to keep me grounded, but I need to give an explanation, which might be a rationalization, and if you don't know the difference go ahead and google it.  Seriously, if you haven't figured out that the internet, the web, google, is the biggest baddest bestest encyclopedia you have ever seen then you just simply do NOT want to learn.  And that is okay, do your own thing, as my hippie-self would say.  But if for some odd reason, perhaps curiosity, which is innate in most of us and will probably be found to be one of the basic emotions in our brain and will have an actual cluster of neurons associated with it, but I'm rambling, if for some reason you want to hear my explanation then read on.

I'm setting the ground rules here, kinda copying from John Scalzi, who is an excellent sci fi writer and who has the whatever blog (I think he still has it) and I'll admit right from the start I prefer to learn from the best and I doubt anything I do is original and everything here is simply a retread from the geniuses before me so accuse me of being a copycat or whatever, I don't care.  I'm mostly copying from the *best*, and John Scalzi is one of the best.

The thing is this is *my* blog and at the moment I am allowing public comment but I will turn that off if I need to, either for spam (does it really account for 70% of all internet traffic??) or for any reason whatsoever so put that in your pipe and smoke it!  And don't even try the free speech thing on me, youngster, because I was all over it when you were doing poo poo in your didees and I don't put up with willful ignorance.  Not here.  I'm gonna call stupid stupid and ignorant ignorant and if you don't like it take a hike son, take a hike.

Back to the topic - why CERN, why the large hadron particle accelerator?!

I'm not totally sure.  I don't believe in destiny, I believe in reality.  I believe very much in reality.  And yet particle physics has always been a passion of mine.  I want to know the complete nature of reality.  It is an itch that I simply must scratch.  I have always had it, and I used to say that when I die if I get to meet God and if I get one question I'll ask "What is the complete nature of reality?"

Yeah, I used to say that, but I don't anymore.  Why not?  Because I was fortunate enough to briefly share an office for a few months with an incredibly brilliant new graduate from MIT and I told him my "question for God" story.  Hey, it is an amusing story and it gets people to talk about themselves and you can find out the most interesting things when you get people talking about themselves.  Not everyone, I suppose, but an MIT graduate?!  You know that guy is going to be very interesting.  Seriously, do you know how hard it is to get in to MIT?!   For me - it was the University of Illinois - with no questions asked because I lived in Illinois and our family had four children (did I say I was the oldest) and while my Dad had a good job, working for IBM (back when IBM was good to work for), we were not made of money and, as Tom Cruise playing Joel Goodman said in Risky Business - "U of I here I come!"  If you don't know the movie you should.  Great movie.

So I went to U of I, third in the nation in Engineering, woohoo!! (Behind MIT and CalTech).  That is what we told each other when we were studying our butts off while those at Western Illinois were having all the good parties.  Or so we thought.  After college I found out *everybody* thought they came from the third best Engineering college in the nation.  Nobody gave a crap that I came from the U of I.  So what was all my hard work for?  I'm not sure.  Maybe it would have paid off if the market was tight for Engineers, but luckily when I graduated everybody and his brother was trying to hire engineers.   A lot of the work was working on weapons, but that is a story for another time.

Anyway, Gabby, (pronounced "Gobby," a nickname.  Obviously) the brilliant young man from MIT said something nobody else said when I told my "question for God" story.  He said "What if God answers "I dunno, I just did it.  I'm God.  I can do whatever I want.  You're so smart you figure it out for yourself."  I laughed at the time, because it was a clever response, and we were bored, passing time doing some stupid boring task to make some rich man richer, and we didn't want to get to the truly hard, boring work that would really make some rich man richer, so we had time to laugh.  And we did.  Gabby quit IBM after about six months.  I told you he was smart.

But I stayed.  Because I had obligations.  And plenty of time to think.  And Gabby's quip began to eat at me.  And I saw that while my idea of asking God made for a funny story, and he had made it funnier, I might not actually get the chance to ask God that question, and even if I could, I might not get an answer.  And even if I did get an answer, it might not be the answer I want.  Which reminds me - do I believe in God?  Yeah, pretty much.  I'm spiritual. Let's get that out of the way right now.  But that topic, dear reader, is for another time, and I could fill volumes on that topic.

But I digress once more.  Why CERN?  When I was in high school we took a field trip to the Fermilab in Batavia IL.  I was lucky to live kinda close to it, and I was lucky to be good at sports so I could also be good at school and not get hazed, and I was lucky enough to listen to good advice from good people, so I went to FermiLab on a HS Physics class tour.   I also saw Armstrong walk on the moon when I was about twelve, and I drank that koolaid, long and deep.  I drank that koolaid.

So science and exploration got ahold of me good and hard, and stuck with me while I lived life and made money and survived long enough to reproduce.  And particle physics was nice enough to give me interesting questions without the answers, bless its heart.  And those questions stayed with me.

So fast forward about thirty five years and here I am, some free time and the best research tool at my finger tips.  So what would you do?  I should mention that at work (and also at home too) the internet porn thing was out of the question.  It gets boring, too.  So I did not do what you would do, my secretive reader.

I studied.  That is what I did.  My main areas were politics and economics, mostly because at the time those were having the biggest impact on my life, and not in a good way.  I pretty much figured those two topics out (there are some more topics for future posts), and then I got back into quantum mechanics and particle physics.

Well shoot, the whole time I had been making rich people richer and also having kids and raising them, helping my wife, there were whole battalions of other people, smart people, finding out some of the answers for me!  And they were willing to tell me about it!  I didn't have to read between the lines and interpolate and consider the underlying motives like you have to do when reading about politics or money.

No.  They just came right out and told the truth as best they knew it, and were even willing to admit mistakes if proven wrong.

How refreshing.  Really.  It reminded me of why I had probably chosen science in the first place, although when I was a youth that was mostly done out of gut instinct.

But dammit this post has really gone on long enough.  Now I'm gonna have to proofread it all and that is a big chore.

So why CERN, and why now?

Particle physics is incredibly interesting, and at this moment it is also incredibly topical.  You think energy research is not important?!  Do you know that CERN will hopefully be starting up again in November, knock on wood, and if so the physics world will be flooded with a deluge of brand new data?  More on that later.

And yes, the internet is incredible for research but sometimes you just gotta be there.  You gotta be there in person, if you get the chance.  Watching the world on TV is OK, and playing a persona in a simulation can be very very compelling, but sometimes you simply must leave the Matrix.

Because reality is where it is at, dude.  Reality is where it is at.