Hadron, Hamlet and the Higgs boson

Physics must be fun, and particle physics even funner. My invention of a new word there is by way of being a nod to one of the things physicists seem to have most fun with – naming things. The language of physics is quirky, colourful and often poetic. What other branch of science would have given names like Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Top and Bottom to six tiny little bitty things (types of quark) which have never been studied because they are incapable of being seen – incapable, in fact, of existing on their own, per se, as it were. We just know by inference that they're there, and we know that with leptons and bosons they make up, well, everything there is in this universe.

Today, the physicists were really having fun, because they announced to the scientific community, and the rest of the world, that they were 'tantalisingly close' to proving the existence of the Holy Grail of physics, the Higgs boson. The existence of the Higgs boson was posited in 1964 by three groups of physicists working independently of one another – Peter Biggs was simply the lucky one whose name was borrowed at the time.

As Eddie Cassie used to say, I don't know anything about anything, but my understanding is that the Higgs boson is important because it is thought to form (I'm struggling here) a field . . . lets just say it's the thing through which those building blocks of matter, the quarks, bosons and leptons, must pass in order to acquire mass. Without mass, the little fellows would go here, there and everywhere without actually being anything at all – they would exist, but they wouldn't, on their own, have any mass and therefore couldn't, on their own, add up to anything meaningful like, say, you and me. If the Higgs boson is proven, it will be the final piece in the jigsaw of the Standard Model of Particle Physics – the explanation of matter.

Announcements in physics don't get much bigger (or presumably funner), so it was fitting that Rolf-Dieter Neuer, director-general of Cern, who operate the Hadron Collider which made the 'tantalising glimpse' possible, should introduce a little drama by invoking the greatest wordsmith of them all when he addressed his peers:

'We still need many more collisions next year to get a definite answer on the Shakespeare question on the Higgs: "To be or not to be . . ." '

Excellent.

I've posted about this before (here), but if you want to know more about how quarks, leptons, bosons, mesons, hadrons and baryons fit into the scheme of things, you might enjoy this:-

'Strange Charm' by Vlogbrothers

A dog on the edge

Sea dog

For a dog who doesn't really enjoy the water all that much (as in swimming in it), Eddie looks very much at home in a boat.

Eddie and Lilly

Eddie and Lilly at The Blue Cabin

Who can say whether romance is in the air, but they walked all the way round the island today, and I think we can take 'firm friends' as read. They only met yesterday..

Tish Hinojosa, Closer Still

I don't know why really, but five or six of my top ten performers are female singer-songwriters. This is Tish Hinojosa singing one of my favourites, Closer Still. She's at the Ostsee Festival in Kiel, Germany and what I like most about this performance is that it's just two years ago, she's looking great – and we're almost  the same age. Tish, who sings in both Spanish and English, was born on this day in 1955 in San Antonio, Texas.

We were introduced to her by our dear friends Leslie and Andrew, and a few days before they moved to Santa Fe, we travelled to Glasgow with them to see her perform. We were in the front row, and I embarrassed L&A (remember Amiga?) by going up to Tish and asking her to sing something for 'Our good friends, shortly to leave us for New Mexico'. She was most gracias about it, and introduced the song by saying, 'You know, there's something about Northern New Mexico . . .'

There sure is.

Brent geese rising

This video, taken on the mobile yesterday, was more or less accidental. I didn't know the geese were there until a sentry bird saw me and sounded the alarm – fortunately, I had the phone in my hand, and in camcorder mode, because I'd just taken a series of short videos for a YouTube project I've been thinking about for a while (I'll probably upload that one in a week or two). Anyway, hope you enjoy – there's nothing like a flight of geese against the sunset!

Blackstaff Press eBook video by Millar Grattan Media

Gary Grattan of MGM (that's Millar Grattan Media, not the other one) kindly sent me a link to the video he made for Blackstaff Press at the Linenhall Library recently, to mark the launch of Blackstaff's new eBook list. The weatherbeaten old guy in the video is me..

Gary – sorry to edit out the library material and all the other authors, but the file size was enormous :) I thought the whole production was very slick and a propos by the way, and I'll be in touch as discussed about The Blue Cabin movie spectacular in due course! M

The link to the Belfast Telegraph Online piece by Gary, which has the entire video, is here.

No post

I won't be posting tonight (if you know what  mean) because I have an editing job to finish, on a tight deadline, and paid editing jobs don't grow on trees!

Lucky me

Times like this, I realise how lucky I am. An hour ago we crossed in a gale, gusting to 60mph. The boat took a good hammering and so did we, and if I was more than a little apprehensive, Lynn was downright frightened, and I don't blame her. In fact, I don't know how she puts up with it sometimes.

On eBooks

Responding to Friday's post about The Blue Cabin going digital, our friend Laura, a lover of books – by which I mean books – had this to say (with a smiley face of course):

"Don't go digital, books are supposed to have pages & not batteries & they are supposed to dry out after you've dropped them in the bath, not implode, and they are supposed to gather dust until you rediscover them 10 years later and you're supposed to be able to leave them on park benches and wonder about who will pick them up. They are also meant to keep you healthy, lugging large weights around is a great aerobic workout. Do you want to play a part in the death of libraries? Where's your sense of social responsibility!!"

I pointed out that the jury was still out for me but that Lynn was in the market for an eBook device because she is a voracious reader and, being island-bound much of the time, doesn't get to the bookshops often enough to feed her habit. To this, Laura offered Amazon:

"It does great reviews & after a few purchases suggests BOOKS (with real pages) that you may enjoy.  It has, however, to my great disappointment, strayed into Kindle territory (I wonder if it is so named cos it's subliminally encouraging everyone to burn their real books; maybe they could have been less subtle and called it Bonfire or Conflagration or something more obvious)."

I responded that our internet connection on the island is so patchy, searching sites like Amazon is an exercise in frustration – to post to this blog, for example, I do the writing and prepare the image off-line, then access my Blogger account and hope for the best (many a time the laptop has almost ended up, to borrow a phrase from our Sicilian friends, 'feeding the fishes') – and so far I haven't heard back from Laura. She'll have an answer though – she usually does.

One thing's for sure: she's not alone!

One after the other in succession..

When I correspond, as earlier today, with someone to whom words are important, I subconsciously self-edit as I go – perhaps we all do. It doesn't mean foregoing a conversational tone, or inserting every pronoun: 'Heard it was meant for Lynn and me' would be fine, but 'Heard it was meant for Lynn and I' would be run through the mental grammar checker and auto-corrected. So, when I said this:

'You know that feeling when you're digging a hole for yourself and you start trying to dig yourself out. . .'

there must have been a systems failure, because I was talking to someone who could spot a tautological construction at a hundred pages – not that they would dream of mentioning it. I might have got away with, 'You know that feeling when you're digging a hole for yourself and you start digging all the harder. . .' but hindsight is a fine thing.

In a 1988 campaign speech in Ohio, George H W Bush said, 'It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or another', and Barack Obama once campaigned under the slogan, 'Beliefs we can believe in'. The first is a howler; the second, you could make a case for in the name of rhetoric. Many more have become acceptable through usage: 'free gift', 'unsolved mystery', 'short summary', 'new innovation' and the more contemporary 'digital download' to name a few. But my favourite tautology is by someone who is famous for its cousin, the paradoxical contradiction – Peter 'Yogi' Berra, the baseball legend. Berra once said:

'It's like deja vu, all over again.'

Which gives me an excuse for another Yogi Berra quote. When giving directions to his house, he used to say, 'When you get to a fork in the road, take it.' It was meant humorously, but the directions were good: whichever road you chose, you got to the house.

Tyrella beach

This rather 'could be anything' picture, taken on my mobile, is actually of plover rising from Tyrella beach, where I was walking mum's dog Sammy this afternoon. Time was, I always had a camera to hand – I must get back into the habit.

The virtual Blue Cabin

How surreal is island life sometimes.

Yesterday I was at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast with a glass of sauvignon blanc in one hand a nibble in the other, celebrating the launch of Blackstaff Press's eBook list and watching myself and five other Blackstaff authors give our impressions and expectations of this brave new virtual world in a promotional video; at this moment, I am sitting in semi-darkness in my office at the cabin, a pair of ridiculous-looking fleece trousers pulled over my jeans, two extra layers on my top half (one cashmere, one fleece) and a wooley hat, hoping that the dongle in my laptop will hold an internet connection long enough to upload this post and looking forward to migrating north, to the living room, where a blazing woodburner awaits.

The Blue Cabin, I'm honoured to say, is in the first wave of Blackstaff's books to be published in digital format, and as of yesterday is available for Kindle, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Sony Reader, PC, Mac and Android.

The link to the Kindle Edition of The Blue Cabin on amazon.co.uk is here, and on amazon.com here.

Otter on the jetty

We hadn't seen an otter for months, then this morning I was gazing out the window when I should have been working, and a young otter (pesumably this year's cub) climbed up onto the jetty, stared at me for a moment and plopped back into the water. Fortunately, Lynn came to the window quick enough to corroborate my story..

Masterchef: The Professionals

I caught the tail end of Masterchef: The Professionals on BBC2 last night, and I was so nonplussed by what presenters Monica Galetti and Gregg Wallace said to this guy that I watched some of it again on i-player a moment ago, just in case either I had misunderstood/misheard – or alternatively they weren't being serious. Amazingly, they were being serious. It would appear that Harley, a professional chef from Hull, is a seriously good cook, because both judges were impressed by his efforts; but Monica told him to 'get a shave and a haircut' before coming back and Gregg prefaced his remarks by saying, 'well, you hippie..' (granted, in the nicest possible way).

Neither Galetti nor Gregg meant any offence of course, and none was taken – Harley seems to be laid-back and decent enough to take it in his stride – but I just thought: is this not a tiny bit judgemental? Shouldn't the judges be concentrating on the dishes rather than the grooming? Was the length of the contestant's hair (not even particularly long by the way) not, well... irrelevant, and indeed none of their business? I couldn't help thinking that had this been a female contestant, she would hardly have been sent to the hairdressers.

I'll bet the guy comes back all clean-shaven and crew-cut, which is fine I suppose, but the only credit will go to him and his easy-going nature.

Maybe it's just me.

Great minds

Alistair Cooke reads 'Letter From America'

During her years as a BBC Governor, my mother fought the good fight on a number of issues which came up again and again in the boardroom. One was docu-dramas (she doesn't much like them); another was the commercialization of the Olympics (she doesn't care for that either); but the one issue which put her at odds with more producers than any other, was her cast iron conviction that extreme violence on television, fictionalized or real, is taken so far, so often that most of us accept it, and some of us copy it.

This is a passage from Alistair Cooke's Letter From America No.1816, from December 1983, entitled 'Hype':-

'Somebody – it may have been me – once said that a fire is easier to film than an idea. And this truth is, unfortunately, the first article of faith in the credo of all television news cameramen who are not afraid to move in for the first spurt of blood from a dying man, to remind us old film buffs of that ghastly shot of a body slumping out of a car in Bonnie and Clyde, which alas set the mode for a thousand subsequent blood baths.'

Great minds. 'Cookie' (not my nickname – I got that from John Cole) was born on this day in 1908.

Now showing

Rock Layers
Lynn McGregor RSW
Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire

I've just spent a happy hour updating Lynn's website with current and forthcoming exhibitions. She is showing in Christmas exhibitions at Fisher Gallery, Pittenweem; Aberfeldy Gallery; Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire (above); Strathearn Gallery, Crieff; and McAuley Fine Art at William Street Gallery, Edinburgh (from next weekend).

The William Street Gallery exhibition is a little different – they have asked gallery artists to provide A5-sized paintings, as it's Christmas, and Lynn gave them two (sadly, we sent them off without taking jpegs) That exhibition runs from Saturday 26th November.

Blown away

It doesn't look like much but I've just spent a frustrating half hour trying to get to that boat you can see in top right of the pic. The wind is coming from the south, ie directly up the sound, and I can't manage to row across it - on the last try I was blown into the weed halfway to the wreck and Lynn came out to help me drag the rowing boat back through the shallows.

Aargh. I was keen to catch the 5 o'clock post - never mind.

Silent attack dog..

Not really – just a little game Eddie plays when we've been away. Has some funny ideas, Eddie.

Madcap

A correspondent from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, who I get the feeling has forgotten more about boats than most of us will ever know, picked up on the tiny picture in yesterday's blog:-

"I do have one question: there is a lovely looking little gaff cutter with top mast (if my eyes don't deceive me) on your blog today...do you know any more about her? She's a beauty."

She certainly is. Her name is Madcap and as far as I know she is the oldest surviving Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, built in Cardiff in the same year that Thomas Mann, who wrote Death in Venice, was born: 1875. Why mention Thomas Mann? You might well ask.

***

It would be wrong to mention coastal Massachusetts without giving you this little gem from the great Jack Handey:-

"As I maneuvered my one-man sub into the enemy harbour, I smiled a little smile to myself. It amused me to think that the people of Massachusetts did not even realise that a Connecticut resident was right under their very noses."