Higgs

Hurray!  Finally, the Higgs boson has revealed itself!  This new energy quantum, indirectly observed but consistent with the theoretical predictions…  this missing link (where did I hear that before?), this great leap forward (!) for science. 

But this new phenomenon - hardly worth being called a thing – this new quantum then, more energy than particle in fact, was it really ‘un’covered as Heidegger would say? Was it there or did we see it because we wanted to see it, the latest figment of the human scientific mind?

What will be next on the theoretician’s whiteboard, I wonder.  It must be like facing the black hole. At least now I am assured that the universe won’t fall apart.  At this eve of Halloween, knowing this is somewhat comforting.

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Full Void

The Hubble Space telescope – yes, the one that keeps sending through such wonderful images from space – has now taken a picture of the universe such as it was 13.2 billion years ago.  A ‘baby picture’; a magnificent image of the beginning of time, with myriads of galaxies and gas.  An image in which time is concentrated, the image’s remote past and the present of the observer that we are.

At the same time one of the prominent cosmological theories states that the universe came into existence from a ‘fluctuation of the void’ – or, to say it with a newspaper headline: “the void in action’.  Is your head turning? No worries, let’s just stick with the mystery of existence.

Yet I cannot free myself of the idea that all the cosmic rhythms, the universe’s past and our current time, were present in that big bang.  The full void.

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