#nyt's

Today, after making my way through a tangled wood, I reached the shore of Lake Michigan. Before I could even register the endless blue in front of me, a raft of ducks scattered into the air as if on cue.

What had alerted them? My red jacket? My wispy hair reflecting sunlight? I had been walking quite gingerly.

As I watched the ducks disappear into the haze of the horizon, I wondered if I had caused the muons around them to wobble. That‘s a musing I couldn’t’ve entertained before a recent article in the NYTs alerted me to a physics discovery, that, according to the headline, “could upend the known laws of physics.” The story said that these laws were being challenged by muons, which according to the author are like electrons, but heavier. The muon itself isn’t news. It’s their behavior that is causing the ripples.  The muons wobble, which is not the way subatomic particles are supposed to act. Apparently.

The ‘known’ physics that these muons upended is not known to me, and according to an informal survey of friends, this not knowing is widespread.  I took Physics 101 in college, which I loved much more than my barely-passing grade suggested.  All I remember is viewing film after film of the glorious night sky, with Beethoven’s 6th Symphony booming in the background. During these classes, I fell in love with the heavens, but love isn’t always explicable and as much as I studied, the knowledge that my impassioned professor tried to impart was beyond my reach.  Whatever forces are keeping us and this fragile planet we live on suspended in space, remain as incomprehensible to me now as they were back then. Nevertheless, it was good to read about the wayward muon, confirming what I’ve always felt to be true – that humans, including scientists, are still light years away from any certainty about the origins of the universe, and how it all works.  Which means anything is possible.