Wednesday, July 4, 2012

You Are a Boson Brain

For my whole life, my younger sisters have called me "Bozo-Brain" - insultingly as kids, and affectionately as adults.  In fact, our whole branch of the family has expanded - DH is "Boz'"; sons are "Little Boz" or "Mini-Boz".  I remember when my second sister wrote me a note when she was about four years old:  "YOU ARE A BOSO BRANE".

We live near the Cambridgeside Galleria, and were driving there to pick up laundry detergent from Sears (more on this perhaps later - on the class unfairness of those with internet, cars, and storage space being able to stock up on household supplies to save money and time and get even further ahead).  The floors in the parking garage are marked, oddly, to include half-floors like "2 1/2" between "2" and "3".  DH was driving too fast, so I asked him to slow down and he said, "I'm a fundamental particle, so I'm not really comfortable unless I'm at an integer level".  I answered, "I always knew you were a Boson".

It turns out we are a match made in heaven, going back a few generations - DH's uncle, Dr. Howard Gordon, was recently quoted in an article about the new discovery of the Higgs Boson:

It was vindication for a generation of scientists. "Tears came in my eyes when the five-sigma number came up," said Brookhaven National Laboratory's Howard Gordon, who is the U.S. deputy operations program manager for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The U.S. contingent of ATLAS, hosted at Brookhaven and consisting of over 700 people from 44 institutions, helped to build many of its key detectors and handles about 20 percent of the worldwide computing effort involved in simulation and analysis of its data.

No comments:

Post a Comment