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Quantum Compassion A Study of Human Nature Through Particle Physics

Eden Petri

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

QUANTUM MECHANICS

The Standard Model ............................................................................................................ 4

above 160 MeV ................................................................................................................... 5

Closed Universe .................................................................................................................. 6

Particle Collision ................................................................................................................. 7

Super Symmetry .................................................................................................................. 8

Superposition ...................................................................................................................... 9

THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

The Higgs Boson ............................................................................................................... 11

Haikus ............................................................................................................................... 12

Quantum Electrodynamics ................................................................................................ 13

Glueball ............................................................................................................................. 15

Dark Matter ....................................................................................................................... 16

Strange Quark ................................................................................................................... 17

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QUANTUM MECHANICS

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The Standard Model There are four fundamental forces at work in the universe and yesterday the weak force collapsed. We’re stuck in particle recession, paper signs plastered around our neighborhood Lost Graviton: Reward if found. People are exchanging W and Z bosons in the backs of alleys, getting high off of illegal energy transfers and we’re losing our balance. A young boy explains gravity in the middle of his schools auditorium— explains relativity, infinite range. He wins second place in the science fair but all equations involving infinity turn out meaningless.

All equations lacking real numbers turn out meaningless. Everything is turning out meaningless and

we’re downing bottles of electrons in hopeless attempts to understand attraction spinning in circles around conclusions we can’t reach A young boy throws particles out of a window throws particles out of a window— throws himself out of a window on a subatomic scale, the effect of gravity is so weak as to be negligible. But we’re forgetting how big we really are.

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above 160 MeV After “his take on evolution” by m.g martin i learned quantum chromodynamics like i learned my own name. a quark pair in confinement produces enough energy to create more, in real life we’re living friction. they call me confinement because of my restricted take on creation. i question science and it answers. i question anything else, and it goes straight to voicemail.

i’m living asymptotic freedom

high on energy reactions a singular particle with no where to go

i haven’t slept in days

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Closed Universe Clusters of galaxies are falling towards Earth like atomic bombs, and the impact will wipe out all of North America. The world is drunk off of stable and electrically neutral particles and when they pass me the bottle, I down it. The impact will wipe out all of North America and I should be studying for midterms but when they pass me the bottle, I down it until my body doesn’t exist and I am free falling. I should be studying for midterms— I should be attempting to understand this world but my body doesn’t exist and I’m free falling, I can’t concentrate on anything. In an attempt to understand this world, drunk off of stable and electrically neutral particles, concentrated— a cluster of galaxies falling towards earth like an atomic bomb.

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Particle Collision You are the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles and without you my thoughts weigh more than my self. You tell me that to count the stars I need to concentrate on absence, and yet I spend most of my time calculating the speed at which I’m falling (air resistance is negligible) and the total time it’ll take before I’m twisted against concrete. They say there are two options when you jump: to go face first and know the exact moment of impact, or to go feet first—take comfort in not knowing. our world is kinetic energy, our matter never ending.

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Super Symmetry Everything in this world hates being alone, and independence doesn’t exist outside of my world. It is date night inside of my body. There are disco balls hanging from my bones and Everyone is dancing to the beat of my heart. When I try to shut it down I can feel the fires starting in my lungs—

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction (While explaining the basic laws of physics,

a young boy jumps onto the table. When his mom tells him to get off the table before you break it, he replies with Newton’s third law: I am exerting a force on the table, and it’s exerting a force onto me, equal and opposite His world is balanced). I am a Fermion particle with a half unit of spin and no one to dance with. They threw my body in the LHC and called it particle physics.

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Superposition (Schrödinger’s Cat Speaks) I live in a steel box. Pictures of our universe hang on the walls and decay. The table set for two, a bottle of wine in the center, to open it: a hammer.

I wait for you. The uncertainty principle states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined the less precisely it’s momentum can be known. But everything I think I know is based on feeling, and I spend my free time counting catastrophes

because until you walk through the metal door you are in equal parts coming and not coming and it is only a matter of time before every subatomic particle in this world goes on strike, because who can afford to make the wrong decision now. we are living string theory, and the possibilities are endless.

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THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

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The Higgs Boson (Confirmed on July 4, 2012) Intoxicated, I stumbled into the wrong calculus class. That was the first time I ever saw you. You tagged “Love, God Particle” across my house, along the side of my car, on my dog. Your presence lingers like the smell of your perfume; permeates my body until it is fire in my lungs. Every where I go, you are there and yet you are as elusive to me as God, herself. I break every bone in my body looking for you, stand in the middle of an alley next to a fetid dumpster and tell you that I love you scream it at the top of my lungs but our world is mute and the electromagnetic field is broken and the universe as we know it is slowly slipping from our grasp. We have forgotten how to count and in our geodesic singularity, mass has ceased to exist. your heels—knives splitting concrete. I see you leaving church one Sunday, picture you on your knees, helplessly praying to yourself. You are the last unverified part of my world & every breath I have questions your existence.

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Seasonal Math I use the law of complementary angles— find you in winter. Right Angle You are 45 degrees Fahrenheit: Perfect in it’s symmetry. Circuits You are the board lit like a cloudless summer night— electricity Momentum P = mV everything is conserved: fall— we’re losing our mass. Andromeda 2.5 million light years, we’re drifting through space and standing our ground.

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Quantum Electrodynamics You are the missing piece that explains every unverified thought in my world and the reason I’m failing conceptual science. Under the stars, you teach me Schrödinger’s theory of Entanglement

for the first time. In special relativity, we are space and time interwoven into a single continuum, pieces of a larger whole. You theorize, I quantize, and our world, thermonuclear fusion—birth of a star. Pray to the father, to the son, to the holy spirit and to science. I never understood scientific notation or people’s need to save time no matter how infinitesimal. We are made up of subatomic stars screaming about efficiency and world peace, Waiting for the start of World War III, which in theory, will be every theoretical scientist claiming to be the father of modern science because their understanding of our world is all inclusive of space and time and gravity. All at once you tell me that peace is relative and that every star visible with the naked eye is already dead, that stars are metaphors for people. When I ask you about quantum field theory you tell me that light doesn’t matter,

that you would rather choke on every unexplainable piece of our universe, every incomplete scientific theory. You say that we need to spend less time trying to explain the world, and more time fixing the world. But you are my world. Under the stars, I read you articles from Time Magazine and you teach me theoretical science, You tell me that we are pieces

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of a larger whole, pieces incapable of complete satisfaction. My hands—science, you—birth of a theory.

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Dark Matter 1. When she asked for my name I told her Gravity. 2. She wrote her number on my hand,

and the other 95.1 percent— a hypothetical kind of love. 3. We search On the Global Electrostatic Charge of Stars and in terms of position we are t squared + 2t + 1 she sketches the derivative to find the velocity at which we’re falling 4. I sketch the universe over her body, sketch everything I know. When she asks me why I obsess over science, I kiss her. I don’t want to tell her that the particles that hold me together are running away in masses, that I’m falling apart. I am a model she wants desperately to fix.

6. Our collision is inevitable— the impact will shatter us and the aftermath will remain in perpetual space because technology isn’t advanced enough to remove our fragmented bodies 7. I blame physics.

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Glueball On the eighth day God said “Screw science,” and drowned herself in gluons. After that, I spent my free time learning quantum field theory and observing decay channels but she stuck like glue to my thoughts. I looked for her in everything I did wrote stories instead of lab reports poetry instead of physics I lived in an ideal reality that lacked physicality— Everything stopped making sense. I counted particles instead of time, witnessed the collapse of the subatomic world—

I watched gravity pull me apart. At night, I dreamed of particle collisions. Woke from nightmares sweating extra mesons, I searched for W & Z bosons, for quarks, leptons and antiparticles, photons or gammas but they weren’t there and when I looked for your decayed body, it wasn’t there. My world is missing matter.

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Strange Quark You knew your way around a charm quark, knew the second generation of particles by heart could get yourself out of anything. Before I met you I didn’t believe in deductive reasoning. I pull out a box of every star labeled a hypothetical kind of love and I cross out hypothetical. Before I met you I didn’t trust gravity. You pulled me apart, limb from limb only to put me back together. You told me that every seven years

each cell in our body would have regenerated. that every seven years we were a completely new person. Scientifically, I knew you were wrong. But as I placed every theory into the box, as I put my world in superposition, I felt my body like I’ve never felt it before.