Article for 2013 Dec 03

2013

2013 Dec

Dec 03 Tue

Thoughts swirl around my brain at close to the speed of light, and collide and interact in ways it can be very difficult to keep track of. It’ll start off quite predictably. I’ll think the thoughts I’ve thought before. Then things will go a bit berserk. Thoughts accelerate: they speed up (frequently), they slow down (occasionally), and change direction (all the time). It’s exciting, stupefying, unnerving. Grey matter matters a lot to me. Grey antimatter too. I think about thinking quite a bit, initial thoughts multiplying such that I sometimes think conservation of thought is violated, but, despite it being more elusive than a Higgs boson, there is always a rational explanation in the end.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the school trip I’m on to Geneva, where the European Organisation for Nuclear Research has its headquarters and a lot of its equipment. Perhaps the talks on the decays of muons are re-kindling a love of Physics within me. Perhaps the fear of being knocked down by a tram - of which there are many in Switzerland - is whetting my senses. Perhaps I should be getting on with the Latin essay I still haven’t written. It’s in for next week.

But let’s return to thoughts on thoughts, as I so often do. We have now come full-circle: thoughts, Higgs boson, Geneva, muon, thoughts. I meanwhile have gone full-circle many times in writing this article. And some multiple of three-hundred-and-sixty degrees later, what are our results? What conclusion - if any - can we draw from our investigation?

Sometimes my brain feels like the Large Hadron Collider.