It's cold and summer is slipping away without barely announcing its presence. That much I'm sure of. If I'm lucky I'll get five hours sleep tonight. And my knees and back hurt from the effort of dragging my big ol' body up three flights of stairs, fighting gravity all the way.
Yes, things are pretty certain within my comfortable Newtonian existence. The poorly aligned springs on my pull out sofa bed obey Hooke's law, everything makes sense.
No1 son was doing his homework last night, part of which was to ask people how they thought the universe had begun. I gave the best answer I could, trying to remember as much of the stuff about the Big Bang as my lapsed physicist's brain could recall. Admittedly, most of that comes from the opening titles of The Big Bang Theory ('The whole universe was in a hot, dense state/ When nearly fourteen billion years ago....) but I had some vague notion about the primordial atom and I chucked in something about that was when time began too. Ever one for the scientific method I tried to point out that there was evidence for the Big Bang in the background radiation that can still be picked up on Earth. I wanted to use the phrase 'pre-Baryonic' matter, but I wasn't sure if I had a) remembered that correctly and b) what it actually meant so I didn't go there. I was confused, but I was confident that someone, somewhere had an idea of all the hard maths involved to figure it all out and it was only a matter of time.
Then we get this report that suggests that it may be possible to create particles that move faster that the speed of light. I love the uncertainty of it all - the results have apparently gone through more checks than would be necessary to claim a discovery, but such is the potential hugeness of all this they're asking other scientists to also check the work and see if they can replicate this extraordinary occurrence. If it does pan out it'd be incredible to think of this cold and miserable day being the one where our understanding of how everything works was altered so radically. I don't know if it's comforting or frightening to realise that nobody really knows anything.
In the meantime I'm off to bed to let my unconscious mind try to make sense of it all.
More soonliest.
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