The following is the gist of an abstraction currently featured in the 21st revised edition of V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman.
Hear, I pray you, the dream that I dreamed, my friends, and help me to
divine its meaning.
Nietzsche
Where energy is converted into mass, intelligence is
transmuted into representative perception. Indeed, nobody will ever get to the
end of the physicist’s rainbow, his ability to ‘create’ ever new particles. It
is infinite. A Pandora’s box of never-ending hope and infinite solutions. In
fact, virtuals are not a solution, they are the description of a
problem, and so long as there is hope, the problem is
called a particle. Truth
to tell, no one has even half an inkling about the notion of living
conceptually. We neglect entirely the fact that our ideas of physical space
are directly related to inherently anthropomorphous conceptions and that these
mind-creations come into life as the fundamental form of its thought. For even
when anatomized in meticulous detail, there is undoubtedly something cognitive
in the material evolution of
contemporary physics and its most fundamental doctrine: that the particle is
only half the equation. The other half is mind itself, the intelligent
participator with his conceptual commitment to the four dimensions of the
continuum. For whatever philosophical position we take, if theoretical physics
creates its means out of itself, i.e., without introducing any knowledge
from the world ‘outside’, it seems clear by all accounts that when the
door is closed and the position assimilated, it also assumes the reality of the result. Nor can we
ever hope to grasp the concept of actual reality because it is only in
terms of the knowledge it has proved to itself that reality is defined. Instead
of the a priori being absorbed, the conceptual images of classical
matter and form are abstracted from it. Whether it is in pairs of hadrons and
leptons, or in triplets of quarks, and served in a minuet of
‘flavours’ and ‘colours’, the metaphors struggle to capture the living reality.
Somehow they are beyond words, in
essence no more than a matter of gossip - the grin without the Cheshire Cat.
The
words are guarded. Terms like virtual or messenger mask the
reality behind the standard model of particle physics. In fact, the term particle
itself is deceptive, since all such subatomic units, whether fermions or
bosons also have wave-like properties. Exact details of such
fundamentals need not detain us here,
but if the standard model consists of three generations of matter
particles, plus a collection of force particles, then the Higgs boson - as another version of the
Doctrine of Immaculate Conception - is but the last custodian of the Riddle of
Creation, the one remaining conduit to the origins of the universe, the spells,
incantations and mysteries which God alone was meant to unlock. And God himself
made precisely this point in a very public announcement: “I will open my mouth
in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.” (Matthew
13:35).
The
correspondence is analogous of course, but
it is certainly conceivable that the virtual particle emulates the
efforts of the human mind to find not only self-expression, but expression also
of an elementary idea. A sort of coercive formula, one might say, guided by a
sense of mathematical structure which brings the unknowable secrets into
harmony with a system of belief as an anthropic prime-principle and in such a
way that it satisfies all the conditions necessary for the system to be true.
Created purposefully and unmistakably by an idea, it does give the universe a
measure of suggestion that tends to match up to the expectations, the imagery
and the vocabulary of the mind or, indeed, to the symmetry between mind and
matter, wave and particle, that is such a fundamental feature of its virtual forms. In fact, it seems
almost unnecessary to add that the interdependence of matter and mind has come
to be one of the central problems of a modern theory of knowledge, for nobody
can tell precisely where the line of distinction should actually be drawn.
That
being the doctrine of matter which dare not speak its name, it accordingly
stipulates the conditions to which phenomena must conform if they are to be
perceived, i.e., if they are to interact with matter in order to create mass.
Born of man’s discontinuous understanding of separate moments, the Higgs boson is a fundamental, inescapable property
of the world, or conversely, the application of what is known as the anthropic
principle. Located not at “the spatial or temporal end of the universe” – but,
it has been claimed, “at the explanatory
end”,[1] it fingers the fundamental question about identity and
self-determination: To be or not to be? And that, indeed, is the game changer. No one
is likely to forget the longed-for manifestation of the Higgs boson at CERN in
2013. Re-created as the Hamlet of particle physics, the Higgs is the
procrastinating Genie that is inherently conceptual, and highly phenomenal -
rather than super-symmetrical, and which at the end of the day takes time back
to its point of origin.
The
correspondence is analogous of course, but
it is certainly conceivable that the virtual particle emulates the
efforts of the human mind to find not only self-expression, but expression also
of an elementary idea. A sort of coercive formula, one might say, guided by a
sense of mathematical structure which brings the unknowable secrets into
harmony with a system of belief as an anthropic prime-principle and in such a
way that it satisfies all the conditions necessary for the system to be true.
Created purposefully and unmistakably by an idea, it does give the universe a
measure of suggestion that tends to match up to the expectations, the imagery
and the vocabulary of the mind or, indeed, to the symmetry between mind and
matter, wave and particle, that is such a fundamental feature of its virtual forms. In fact, it seems
almost unnecessary to add that the interdependence of matter and mind has come
to be one of the central problems of a modern theory of knowledge, for nobody
can tell precisely where the line of distinction should actually be drawn.  |
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[1]The Higg’s isn’t located at the spatial or temporal “end of the
universe” – it’s located at the explanatory end. It’s the final piece of
the puzzle of how the ordinary matter that makes up our everyday world works at
a deep level. Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the
Universe p 25
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