Of Predators and the Matter of Matter

To Geneva, to spend a weekend with my son Mark, who is a physicist and working with others at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

I left a worried Irving (my minder) back at the Manor. The threat from Al Qaeda had diminished greatly; that outfit was now on the run from American drone attacks involving Hellfire missiles fired from Predator aircraft. Irving was not so sure the jihadists had given up, but when I informed him of a certain mis-information initiative, he relented.

This plan was simplicity itself. Certain imams and mullahs had been approached by the most trusted and scholarly Islamic authorities we could produce, and given a message. To wit: The Qu'ran had been terribly mis-interpreted by said imams and mullahs, particularly where suicide and the treatment of women were concerned. Allah was furious, and, taking a page from Zeus, allowed the Americans to hurl His thunderbolts from the sky. Seems to be working, too.

I was staying of course at the Kempinski. Very pricey, but the view of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc was spectacular. The price had another advantage, in that it was beyond even the outrageous expense accounts of sundry U.N. personnel. Thus I could avoid any number of people walking around boring everyone they met and ever so afflicted with office.

Mark swept into my room, and gaped.

"Wow, Ma! Sure beats the dormitory at CERN."

"Life is there to be enjoyed. This is a suite -- your digs are next door. Laphroaig?"

Mark nodded, and I poured out two healthy dollops of the greatest peat based Scotch there is. "Now, how are things at the great smash-up?"

"We're close," Mark said excitedly. "We're very close to finding the Higgs bosun."

"Won't change a thing. Futile endeavour, really."

It's not futile! The importance --"

"Oh, don't get me wrong. Closing a door in a direction is not a Bad Thing. Allows for exploration in more profitable areas."

You're not still harping on that whole conscious thing, are you? That consciousness, not matter, is at the heart of the universe?"

"You bet I am. Time for you to review Heisenberg, Bell's Theorem, and Alain Aspect's proof of that theorem. And you wouldn't dispute that we are made of atoms?"

"Of course not."

"Well what staggers, or at least it staggers me, is that our atoms have become conscious that they are atoms. I admit this didn't happen overnight -- evolution takes time -- but this did occur. Hence my belief that EVERYTHING IS IN THE PROCESS OF BECOMING. Q.E.D."

Our discussion went on over a spectacular dinner, and well into the night. I ended all this by handing Mark a piece of laminated paper. It was a reproduction of a cartoon in which two puzzled archeologists are in a cave, gazing at a slew of drawings on the walls -- stick figures, hieroglyphs, circles, squares, and any number of unknown markings.

"Take your time with this, Mark. It will become clear."

Mark pored over the drawing for a long time, then exploded with laughter. "Oh, that's good. Very good." He had spotted, in an obscure corner of the cave, a simple inscription: e=mc(2).

"Got it from Punch Magazine," I said, "when it had an international audience. Sadly, not any more."

I miss Punch.