Ecomania

The only certain thing in life is change. The earth has, over the course of its 4 ½ billion years life, gone through many dramatic shifts in its ecology. Today, there are roughly one million animal species on earth. But throughout history it is estimated there have been at least one hundred times this many … the rest having disappeared. During the days of the dinosaurs, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were as much as ten times what they are currently. During the world’s ice ages, glaciers were thousands of feet thick over most of what we now know as New England. Around 250 million years ago, all the world’s continents were part of one massive land mass called Pangaea … which then broke into pieces and drifted around the world to their current locales. Even what we now know as India broke off much later from Africa and, after about 40 million years, slammed into Asia, creating the Himalayan Mountains in the process. (And this, I assume, is why we have elephants and tigers in both locations.) About 700,000 years ago the massive caldera that sits under Yellowstone Park blew its top and darkened our entire world for years, dramatically changing our world’s ecology. And it is expected to duplicate this climatic act sometime during the next few thousand years (perhaps even tomorrow).

And yet today, many of the human species believe that the way things are now are inviolate and should never change even the slightest bit … else it is man who is at fault. If the ecology of the snail darter changes and this fish is not able to adapt to these changes, then man must reverse these ecology changes so that the snail darter can survive throughout eternity. This syndrome I like to think of as “ecomania” … that is, the belief that man owns (and can control) nature and ecology and not the reverse. This, of course, is as silly as watching an egomaniac prancing and preening on the world’s stage as though he/she will live forever. (Remember Bette Davis in her latter years, face sagging from a stroke and not realizing she was a crone, behaving as though she were still 30 and vivacious). I’m afraid that nature will teach us all in the end that we are but a trivial adjunct to our earth’s ecology. (If the billions of humans in the world were all stacked like cordwood in the Grand Canyon, they would only fill a few miles of this river gorge.) To think that we can control and remedy nature’s ways, I think, comes from man’s harnessing of atomic energy. This has inflated our collective ecomania far beyond logic and may, in the end, contribute more to our undoing than atomic weaponry.

Nature will eventually teach us all that the current mass hysteria about how we are despoiling our environment is but a flip of a butterfly’s wing in the hurricane that is nature’s true way.

Higgely Piggely

Physicists in the U.S. and Europe are each spending billions of research dollars in a competitive search for the Higgs boson (named after the physicist, Peter Higgs who first postulated it), the last elementary particle (yet to be discovered) to complete the Standard Model theory of elementary particle physics. The U.S. is using the Fermilab in Batavia, IL and Europe will be using the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the border between France and Switzerland (due to be opened in 2008). Now the Higgs boson is particularly intriguing because it is the elusive elementary particle that is supposed to lend mass to all atomic structures (or matter) – a very meaningful attribute. I have, in the past, speculated on the possibility of gravity existing separately from matter (see this) and this Higgs boson would seem to support this premise … since gravity is proportional to the mass of any two entities. And, without mass, where is the gravity?

But what intrigues me more is why this mass-producing particle is so fleeting (thought to last only a few microseconds in the cloud chambers of these very high energy particle accelerators before it decays into other known subatomic particles)? After all, mass is far from being an elusive physical characteristic … and the converting matter into energy is a fairly complicated process (just ask Mahmoud Ahmabdinejad of Iran.) So why would the Higgs boson be so shy? Perhaps it is because it can only persist in the presence of a specific menu of other subatomic particles (such as those that make up a proton). If this be the case, then it would seem that most if not all Higgs bosons must have been created shortly (within a few hundred million years) after the Big Bang and so bonded to other subatomic particles to create the mass of the universe. And, to expand on my other blog’s speculation, gravity might also have been simultaneously acquired by the universe’s matter that had thusly acquired mass. The excess matter that never acquired the Higgs boson during this period of creation might then have become anti-matter (admittedly, a somewhat loopy speculation but it would explain why there is so much more matter than anti-matter). And the residual gravity that had not been acquired by matter (via something like a graviton) could be, as previously speculated, now represented by what we now call “dark matter.”

Those subatomic particles that are thought not to have any mass, such as photons and neutrinos, may then also be bereft of Higgs bosons (thought to be a relatively large subatomic particle). However, if on the other hand, photons and neutrinos do indeed have a tiny, tiny, miniscule mass (as I have speculated about in past blogs), then this suggests that there might be a spectrum of Higgs boson types (and therefore sizes.) Remember, you read it here first and, I would ask that, this being the case, the smallest of the Higgs bosons be then christened the “Higgs-Potts boson.”