Thing-a-day.com

Today I got a link to a great article at the National Geographic Magazine about the Large Hadron Collider.
There is this queer little paragraph in the write-up:

“Theoretical physicist John Ellis is one of the CERN scientists searching for the Higgs. He works amid totemic stacks of scientific papers that seem to defy the normal laws of gravity. He has long, gray hair and a long, white beard and, with all due respect, looks as if he belongs on a mountaintop in Tibet. Ellis explains that the Higgs field, in theory, is what gives fundamental particles mass. He offers an analogy: Different fundamental particles, he says, are like a crowd of people running through mud. Some particles, like quarks, have big boots that get covered with lots of mud; others, like electrons, have little shoes that barely gather any mud at all. Photons don’t wear shoes—they just glide over the top of the mud without picking any up. And the Higgs field is the mud.”

So I made a pictorial representation, in my best drawn hand:

Yeah, I don’t draw well. But it was fun. That’s Dr. John Ellis there in the Buddhist civara (robe). His left hand instructs the particles to go around the Higgs field track. His right hand is demonstrating the right-hand rule. The Higgs “mud” slows down the heavy Top Quark the most, but barely impacts the electron…and the photon just zips by above. That quantum duck on the right-hand side better give way for the race!

I also claim that if photons don’t have shoes, and float above the Higgs-mudded ground, then they must be the gayest particles ever. Electrons are merely metrosexual.