On 4 July 2012, the CMS and the ATLAS experimental teams at the LHC independently announced that they each confirmed the formal discovery of a previously unknown boson of mass between 125–127 GeV/c2, whose behaviour so far has been "consistent with" a Higgs boson.
Margaret Randall will be reading this afternoon at Alamosa Books. This reading, which is the reading of poets published this year in Gary Brower's brilliant Malpais Review runs from 2:00 to 5:00.
In Geneva they’re popping champagne corks.
London and Brussels,
Princeton and Melbourne follow suit.
The Higgs boson may have showed itself
at last: key to understanding
why elementary particles have mass.
God particle explains diversity
and why things stick together.
Diversity remains illusive in the high thin air
of the Peruvian Andes
where a woman lights a candle
at her village church.
She does not celebrate.
Her infant daughter is gone
and now her prayer
is for the child’s soul.
Without Higgs, say the physicists,
all elementary forms of matter
would dance madly
at the speed of light,
streaming through us
like moonbeams or unruly ideas.
Neither atoms nor this seen world
satisfy our questions.
At a mass grave, Guatemalan evidence
second third and fourth generations
demand an end to impunity.
A skull fragment or bit of blood-caked shirt
are knots on a memory string.
No celebration here.
No champagne. No elegant equations.
The new particle weighs in at 125 billion
This boson, imagined but unseen for decades,
reaffirms a universe
ruled by symmetry.
is due to flaws in the Standard Model.
Dark energy like dark weather
alters the paradigm.
In Sudan lost children walk again.
Cambodia’s Killing Fields hold memories
too real to store in manageable volts.
In Geneva they’re popping the corks.
Champagne tastes flat
upon the tongue.
Poetry submissions are welcome. Email firstname.lastname@example.org.