They call them "light" for a reason. They don't weigh anything. They're massless. I'm referring to photons, or particles of light. These light particles are called bosonic, unlike like the little quark particles of matter, which are referred to as fermionic. Bosons can occupy the same quantum state; fermions cannot. In other words, two or more photons can be at precisely the same place at the same time, because they are bosonic, whereas for anything material or fermionic, this is impossible.
Or is it? What if I could turn my material body into bosons? (Dark matter, incidently, may be bosonic, if the fabled Higgs particle is finally discovered in the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider.) --Thus, creating a dark matter copy of myself may allow me to enter another dimension, one that is interpenetrating the four-dimensional spacetime universe that we perceive with our five senses. (The sixth sense obviously doesn't seem to respect this dimensional limitation very well!) The inert dark matter bosons are heavy. Unlike light bosons. And they are dark. Also. But who knows what my dark body would look like and weigh like from the vantage point of the dark side? Like deep sea fishes, I may not be entirely bereft of illumination.
The masslessness of light may need to be reevaluated in view of Janet Sussman's theories, as explained in this six-part series in her blog The Lion's Maw. Here we encounter the idea of light as perhaps the fundamental constituent of matter as a result of the action of consciousness upon pure, uncreated light. Consciousness consumes and processes pure light and the metabolic result is our bodies. And stars and trees and everything else.
Being is light, literally. Even when it gets a little heavy. That somehow makes it more bearable, doesn't it? "Some are born to sweet delight." Sing it, Jimbo.
2 comments:
Can't wait for the movie. Who did you have in mind to play dark matter? The casting call for bosons would be mighty interesting. --John
While we can only speculate about this. Quarks - it's just a theory so far, it is impossible to see or feel.
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