White Mars by Aldiss Brian; Penrose Roger

Author:Aldiss, Brian; Penrose, Roger [Aldiss, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Euclid: 'Did they believe that in those days?'

'Well, maybe not quite. But they did regard the finding of the Higgs as vitally important in their scheme of things. Also, completing the SSC would have achieved other targets. They put all their eggs in one basket to get the collider funded. The argument became over-heated. Certain physicists assigned an almost religious quality to the Higgs, referring to it as "the God particle" - a good journalistic phrase...'

Euclid: 'Did they believe that in those days?'

Thorgeson looked nonplussed. 'No Euclid, that's where you say, "Why was the Higgs regarded as so important?"'

Amid sympathetic laughter, Euclid spoke. 'Why was the Higgs regarded as so important?'

At his ease now, Thorgeson said, 'I'm glad you asked me that, Euclid. It all has to do with the question of mass. You are aware that most particles of nature have mass, but the photon and graviton - the basic quanta of electromagnetism and gravitation respectively - are exceptions. Those quanta of which matter is mainly composed, the protons and neutrons or their constituent quarks, are massive particles. So also are the kliks and pseudo-kliks that compose the much less massive leptons, such as electrons and muons.'

As Thorgeson continued, referring to 'LEP', the 'LHC', and various particle physics notions such as 'lepton' and 'hadron', I found that I was beginning to lose the thread of much of what he was saying. Fortunately Kathi's earlier explanations were still useful to me, so I knew what some of the terms meant.

Then I heard Euclid saying, 'Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs? Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs? Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs?'

Thorgeson thumped Euclid's back. 'You mean to say, "Could they use the LHC to trace the Higgs?" Well, they finally got the equipment working in about 2005...'

I realised that Euclid was talking with Thorgeson's voice although, without inflection, it sounded almost like a foreign language. But Thorgeson had programmed it. It amused me to think that, although Thorgeson was a stalwart 'hard science' man where questions of the human mind were concerned - believing there was nothing more to human mentality than the functions of a very effective quantputer - he could not resist making fun of his creature now and again.

Kathi had once tried to explain this 'hard science' position to me. Apparently it is commonly held by today's scientists.

She told me that they are simply missing the point. She explained their view to be that human mentality results solely from those physical functions that underlie an ordinary quantputer. I'm not really familiar with these underlying principles, but Kathi did have a go at trying to explain them. Apparently quantputers, and their smaller brothers the quantcomps, act by a combination of brute force computation in the old twentieth-century sense, and a collection of quantum effects referred to as 'coherence', 'entanglement' and 'state reduction'. Although I was never clear about these terms, Kathi explained that mentatropy and CPS detectors ('savvyometers'!) are based on such effects.

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