TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 20: The Time Particle

Image of the Time Particle

‘Einstein’ monopolized the computer and his concentration was such that it vanquished me from his reality. The tiredness associated to the day’s events finally caught up with me so I went to bed leaving my distinguished visitor to his cerebral pursuits.

I laid down on my bed for some sleep but my eyes kept going to the point in the room where the blue light wall had been before. A question popped up in my mind: does time have a tool for the materializing process? I remembered the Timekeeper saying that time interacts with the energy of the future(1) in what constitutes the materializing process that is the present. I wondered what did time use to create the future? It definitely wasn’t the staff-like thingamajig the Timekeeper carried around. But while on that line of thought, I mulled over whether the sparks coming out of it were a clue to finding the answer to such a question.

Tiredness finally won, and as soon as I nodded off I found myself back in the Anteverse.

“Well, well, well… good to see you’re back to finish our conversation,” said the Timekeeper twirling the sparking stick while tipping his glass hat. “Where were we?”

“You said the constant humming I hear in this place is the sound of time building the future. And I was wondering what, if anything, does time uses as a tool to do its materializing?” I asked.

“The tool, as you call it, is a primordial particle that infuses energy with mass. Scientists in your reality named it the Higgs boson, the mass giver. I believe you might have heard of it by its most common name: God’s Particle. A designation disliked by physicists but one that is understandable in the cultural context of the creator god when you take in consideration that this particle creates matter where there isn’t any. The term is really a misnomer for the boson has nothing to with God and everything to do with time. It should be called Time’s Particle.”

I woke up…

I had no idea how long I had been in bed. All I knew at the time was that it was still dark and I was too excited to sleep, so I went straight to my computer and found ‘Einstein’ gone. Not the kind of surprise that would give me a heart attack, but it would have been nice to have him around to talk about the Higgs boson being time’s particle. Sans Einstein, the only option left was Mr. Google.

My search revealed that the term boson pays homage to the Indian theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, best known for the quantum mechanics work that provided the foundation for the Bose-Einstein statistics. By that time it didn’t surprised me anymore that Einstein’s name kept popping up everywhere I went.

The Higgs boson was named after Peter Higgs, the British theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of this particle way back in the sixties. Its presence was initially recorded in 2012 at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and finally confirmed in 2014. There are several types of bosons and all of them have an integer spin, but the Higgs boson is the only one with zero spin, and it’s the one responsible to give mass to other fundamental particles. But, what I found to be the most interesting fact about the Higgs boson was that they break apart in approximately a ten-sextillionth (10-22) of a second. At the time I thought that number could very well be the time it took the present to materialize!

I sat for a long time staring at the computer screen. I wasn’t expecting a finding like that. Holy crap! I had stumbled into a possible measurement of the instant that is the present. I don’t know how long I sat there motionless. All I know is that at one point I fell asleep on the chair. The sun came up and a tiny ray hit me straight in the face. I woke up and stumbled to the couch where I continued my slumber.

It was way past noon and I was still asleep when I heard the knock on the door.

 

(1) Check out the full extent of what the Timekeeper said in Chapter 16: Bowl Time Revelations