The Maker
We're built out of magical particles assembled into self-aware organic soup on a gorgeous wet rock hurtling through vast emptiness around a ball of passionate fire, all embedded in an unfathomably large set of opportunities, and almost none of it makes any kind of sense. The best theories we humans have about this crazy mess have made incredible predictions and enabled technologies that have begun to dip our toe in the pool of creation, extract energy from realms we cannot see smell taste touch or hear, steadily increase the number of living mothers and fathers, daughters and sons — all while continuing to draw silly little lines in the sand. And yet these theories are still tuned like a psychopath's harp. Tens of free parameters. Masses of particles. Modes of interaction. Mixing angles. Conventions of positive and negative. Even our twisted interpretation of mathematics as a whole. Make any small change and the house of cards comes crashing down. It's quite incredible we've even managed to tie our own shoes.
And yet. The deeper you look, the more the universe seems less like a mysterious machine and more like a joke that's still being told.
I remember growing up starting to ask these questions. Reading books about nutshells. Staying up all night to watch the first beam circulate at the LHC. Getting caught up tweaking my own relationship to consciousness. Going to school for engineering, quickly meeting the love of my life, and having her explain to me that I should really do some physics. So I jumped in — trying to measure neutrino mixing angles, the peculiar neutron skin of lead, trying to catch a dark matter particle directly in the palm of my hand. I built lots of cool stuff too: muon veto system, target arm for a Møller polarimeter, gas distribution manifolds, magnetic piston pump, metallic photocathodes. The building, the creating, absorbed me fully and entirely. Transmuting materials with my own two hands makes me feel safe, it makes me feel powerful. And somewhere along the way, bringing other lives into this beautiful universe to help me ask more questions.
But the questions started to shift. From what am I to what is love. And this is where I found my goofyboson.
A force carrier to stand in where science falls short. For all the silly things closer to our scale. Mediator of the human uncertainty principle. Energy can't be created or destroyed, and while our thinking tends to be very small our actions have impact well outside of our own boundary conditions. We've all been that wrecking ball swinging into work on a Monday morning. Or a random helping hand for a stranger we never see again. Carrying around our own positive and negative soulular charges with the privilege to interact with others around us. Learning to shrink, and learning to grow.
We've all been the goofyboson.
