The Fluffy House of Amityville

I woke up this morning, went downstairs and discovered the walls were bleeding alien blood.

No kidding. Bright green goo was leaking out the electric light sockets and dripping down the walls. This resulted in me rushing around the house at warp speed screaming, “The house is possessed! We’re all gonna die!” (I must admit I’ve always harbored a secret desire to do that, so it was strangely satisfying.) The kids were unmoved, and Rich ignored me. Alas, yet another normal day in the Fluffy household.

Anyhoo, Rich dissected the sockets and discovered that our prehistoric wiring was coated in some sort of ancient insulating glue, which was slowly dissolving and leaking down the walls.

I’m not convinced. It’s because I stepped inside a church for the first time in three years last Sunday. It’s a sign, I know it’s a sign.

Of course the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets turned on tomorrow. That might have something to do with it. Coincidence, or are we all doomed?

Maybe we’re all gonna get sucked into a black hole, as Stephen suggested.

If indeed the end is nigh as my walls seem to prophesize, I'd just like to say that it’s been great knowing you folks! So long and thanks for all the fish. I’m gonna spend my last night on earth getting drunk and having sex.

HoneyB 1164

Toast and Honey are the condemned man's ideal final meal

(Rich says he’s not going to dignify this superstitious nonsense with an answer and he’s refusing to be associated with such utter tosh. Apart from the sex bit – he seems quite keen on that.)

See ya tomorrow.

The Search For The God Particle

Disclaimer: I know nothing about physics, other than it really turns me on. Handy then, that Rich has a degree in it. Getting him to write about it is a somewhat harder task however, so you‘re gonna have to out up with my feeble stab at it instead. Incidentally this has nothing whatsoever to do with photography. But it does make me horny.

People of the cloth will always tell you that mankind will never be able to prove that God exists, or how the universe was created. You have to take it on faith. That doesn’t stop scientists trying, however, and they are about to come mighty close to proving the existence, not of God Himself, but of His particles. The intention is to answer the unanswerable question: how does matter have mass, and thus exist in a form that results in the creation of the universe and all that comprises it?

This is no less than the quest to prove how the world was created, and has been the Holy Grail of physics for over 40 years, ever since Peter Higgs proposed in 1964 that the universe is pervaded by an invisible field of tiny things called bosons which consist of mass but not much else. As particles move through this field, the bosons stick to them, thus increasing their mass whilst leaving others, such as photons (light particles which have no mass), unaffected.

This mysterious boson has become so fundamental to physics that it is known as The God Particle. But no-one has been able to prove it is real. Until now. Later this year, a mysterious device in Cern, Geneva called an atom-smasher (or Large Hadron Collider or LHC to give it its proper name) is apparently virtually guaranteed to find these bosons. Scientists have glimpsed them from experiments using smaller particle accelerators, but they’ve never been able to categorically prove their existence.

Bosons are elusive little buggers by all accounts. They are supposed to exist only at very high energies, which last existed in the moments after the Big Bang, and thus the only way of finding them is using the homogenously large atom-smasher. And big it certainly is. It will fire beams of protons around seventeen miles of underground tunnels before they eventually reach the speed of light and collide, thus releasing vast bursts of energy. The boson particles will then be found by specially developed detectors which are situated in cathedral-sized caverns under the ground. Then of course begins the mammoth task of sifting through and analysing the vast amounts of data before scientists can categorically prove that the God Particle exists. The final results should be ready some time in 2009.

So this is the story so far. If they scientists pull this off, one of the most fundamental questions of physics will be answered, namely why matter has mass. Make no mistake people, this is BIG. Does the God Particle exist, or is it just a figment of imagination? Can we finally find a small piece of the most important puzzle in the history of the universe: the mystery of how our world was created?

Are you getting excited yet? Because I certainly am.



Amy, searching for her own bosons.

The universe exists so you can photograph it!

A common school experiment which everyone will have seen is the interference fringes experiment. A light is shone through two slits and appears as series of light and dark fringes on paper or photographic film on the other side of the slits. This was first observed by Young around 1800, and we are taught that the pattern is due to the wave nature of light,caused by the waves interfering with each other and being reinforced at the bright fringes and cancelled out in-between.

But what happens when you turn the brightness of the light down continually until only a single photon passes through the slit at any one time? Say, one photon per second. Common sense would say that as there is only one photon at a time, there would not be any interference and you should get a random spread of light on the film. However, that is not what we observe, what we actually see is the same interference fringes. Spooky! So each photon that goes through the slit appears to be telling the other photons that come later, which one it went through and where it is.

Now another experiment is to use a photon detector to determine which slit the photon went through and its exact trajectory. When you do this, the interference patterns disappear and you can indeed detect the path of each photon. So now it appears that the photons are no longer talking to each other. Our change in experiment has changed the results.

This wave particle duality has puzzled physicists since it was first observed. Experimental techniques have improved and different methods have been found to test how well it holds and whether there are any violations. One of the most interesting experiments involves setting up the screen to detect the wave pattern in the normal way, but then placing a photon detector behind the screen. The results are startling. If there is no detector there is a pattern, if there is a detector, there is none.

So even more spookily the photon can talk to its own past and change its state.

To explain this you have to consider that the photon exists in a superposition of states throughout time, and it is the act of observing the photon that causes its state to become defined. Basically it is both a wave and a particle at the same time, and choosing to detect is as a particle forces it to be a particle throughout time.

Now there is train of thought which states that all particles are in this superposition of states until an observer causes the state to become fixed. Experiments in quantum mechanics have shown this to be true. If this is true then it is not unreasonable to assume that at the very moment of creation of the universe, all the particles, and the entire state of the universe existed as a superposition of all possible states, and that all that was lacking was an observer to force the universe into a single state.

The spooky thing about this is that one of those states of superposition would include a photographer looking through a lens at a particular scene, and if the nature of the universe allows the state in the future to influence the state of the past, then the simple fact of your ability to exist and observe the universe would cause the superposition of states to collapse and create a universe in which you will exist and take your photograph.

Maybe this is why the universe exists in a state that you can see, it’s simply because you can exist to see it. You are, in fact, the creator of all that you see.

It just so happened that last week the universe’s wave state collapse resulted in me photographing Rachel and I thought I’d take some glamour style shots. So here is one of them. Please Jimmy, don’t cringe too much.