Do We Exist?

Scientists would have you believe that the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is on a par with the  unearthing of penicillin or the first moon landing, although the God Particle, as it is known, is unlikely to ease the pain of venereal disease or create conspiracy theories about the moon’s dark side.

In fact, it’s not a discovery at all, more a confirmation of what scientists already theorised, or perhaps it is just a simple justification for all the money they spent on the large hadron collider at a time when they should have been investing this money in the more honourable adventure of bailing out banks.

Science is the art of studying the behaviour of 15,000 people to discover what you already know or suspected. For example, you will never see a report on research by the University of Arkansas into childhood obesity, which says that to their great surprise, sugar and a lack of exercise is actually good for kids.

Last month the American National Institute on Aging released the results of a twenty five year study into the effect of eating less on aging. They raised a colony of rhesus monkeys (they are the ugly ones who like to steal tourists water bottles in India) and fed half of them a normal diet while treating the rest to a quantity of food that would not look out of place on a Supermodel’s plate.

They discovered that eating less makes absolutely no difference to how long you live. This was a great disappointment to the report’s author who no doubt was looking forward to a long career in the lucrative diet industry.

Needless to say, it came as great news to those of us who are slenderly challenged. But it does prove that scientific studies are carried out to prove things the scientists already suspected. Which makes you wonder how they ever discover anything new in the first place.

So when they dug that big hole in Switzerland and built the Hadron collider, they had a pretty good idea what they were going to find. Either that or the plan was just to keep a few hundred Irish builders in work.

The major achievement of Higgs Boson appears to be the proof that mass can be created out of nothing.  Energy shares space in Einstein’s famous little formula with mass, dangling out there on the left, like a hallucinating drug trying to get into a rave party. Energy can also be created out of nothing. Imagine you are tired after a hard week at work. You want to hit the sofa with a takeaway and a brain numbing night in with a derivative reality TV show for company. You feel like you don’t have the energy to make it to the toilet and contemplate fashioning a colostomy bag from the various crisp packets that litter your sitting room.

Then a text message arrives from a friend inviting you to the pub. For the formula to work it has to be a particular friend who makes you laugh and encourages you to have one for the road at 3am. Everybody has one of these acquaintances who possess a pied piper ability to lure you to the pub when you would refuse all others. You may not realise it, but you are probably that person in somebody else’s life.

Once the message arrives, you will discover that an instant infusion of energy results and before you know where you are, you are skipping down the road like a Duracell battery on acid.

You’ll probably wake in a molten mess on your living room floor with the remnants of a kebab knotted into your hair. And you’ll wonder where you found the energy to party the night before.

So if mass and energy can be created out of nothing, then the speed of light must also be nothing. That’s the third element of Einstein’s theory and if my old Maths teacher thought me anything, it is that if two elements of a three part equation are zero, then the third element must also be zero. And the square root of zero is also zero. Did you get all that?

This raises a few questions. If the speed of light can be created from nothing, then we don’t need the sun. This means that the sun probably doesn’t exist and this is all a dream. That shiny yellow thing I saw in the sky this morning was an orange perhaps and what passes for the moon is actually some cream cheese.

If the sun doesn’t exist, then perhaps we don’t exist either. Funnily enough, that was a conversation I used to regularly have in the pub with a friend of mine who had an uncanny knack of luring me into drinking establishments. He was a shrink who believed that nothing was real and if there was any existence at all, it was only in the realm of the unconscious or in an infinite layer of parallel universes. I found myself always arguing that we did actually exist. This went on for many years until we realised that by having the argument in the first place, we were actually proving my point.  

It would of course be easier if we didn’t exist but thought we did. I wouldn’t have to worry about my weight for example and could avoid reading obscure scientific studies to try and glean a slither of justification for my calorie guzzling lifestyle.

We need answers I think. Can light and speed be created from nothing? Does the sun exist? Do I exist? Is there a logical reason why McDonalds put gherkins in Big Macs when nobody likes them?

I have my theories but I have no proof. However, if somebody will give me 10 billion Euros and a large round hole in Switzerland, I’m confident I can come up with some answers and they will be exactly what I suspected in the first place.