The Scalar Fields

Autumn. Early September brings early mists and early evenings to this patch of the planet I occupy. Walking the dog through rich golden light, blackberries beckon and we stop to take graciously, finding that the fruit is sweet, but the seeds are bitter, and wondering if that means something in the general scheme of things.

Beyond an ancient, crumbling railway bridge long lost to the annals of history, open fields to the east accede to these last rays, burnished rows of slender harvest waiting to be claimed by those who think they own them.

All I see is caused by the construct of reality. Photons allow me to appreciate the colours, phonons then arrive to let me hear the birds. Electrons have the power to propel me on my feet and - what of the breadth of it all?

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This 3D environment I'm walking through is dependent upon scale. Without scale, there would be no height, depth or width. All measurement interdependent, my whole life is governed by positional features I must avoid or appreciate depending on the circumstances.

The tendency to think that quantum mechanics doesn't apply to the 'macro world' because it's 'too small in scale' is so ludicrous as to be laughable. Look down from a plane ten minutes after take-off and you're nowhere to be seen. From the Moon, even an electron microscope wouldn't catch you.

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Postulation is easy, in quantum mechanics, while painting the bricks with colours and assigning them charges, watching them spin and entropically materialise into something else entirely (and most probably more of it) to satisfy the apparent universal demand for infinite expansion. Howsoever this may be, only one particle satisfies the necessary criteria to be responsible enough for the task at hand. Only one carries the highest of credentials (unwittingly bestowed upon it to the fury of physicists who'd hastily dumped Beauty and Truth). That particle is the Higgs Boson, and we know full well what everybody calls that.

Alone in this world, and of course the universe beyond it (the known universe, that is, that we peer at with telescopes), is the Higgs, the scalar boson. As without the photon we would not see, so without the Higgs we would have no dimension in which to exist, with sole dependence upon the height and breadth of everything. When we stop considering ourselves as so big that we count for something, maybe then we can start working out the math. Or rather - somebody else can.

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