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  • The Surprising LMNs That Matter Most
  • Bart Eeckhout

WHAT DO THE purported recent discovery of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, contemporary redirections in queer theory, Harold Bloom, and Wallace Stevens have in common? Not much, most of my readers may be excused for thinking, beyond the coincidence and surprise of finding themselves randomly thrown together in the previous sentence.

And yet the answer is very simple: Lucretius.

If the answer is simple, though, my explanation is not. Or rather, its formulation cannot be so brief and laconic. It can be given only in the form of a narrative in which the four disparate elements assembled in my opening question prove to be folded over in unexpected ways.

The narrative could start at different points, but let me just begin with the first item on the list. The Higgs boson, although I am told it is at once everywhere in space and nowhere (because invisible), and thus what would appear to be a quintessentially poetic substance, is not likely to reappear in the pages of this journal anytime soon. It made a brief splash in the media in early July 2012, coincidentally at the time I began to wonder about my next column. The New York Times ran a front-page article about it under the title “Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe.” Even nonphysicists like myself, who are much better equipped to investigate the elusive particles of modernist poetry, are bound to listen when somebody gets ready to offer the key to the universe.

The journalist in question, Dennis Overbye, starts his explanation as follows: “Signaling a likely end to one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science, physicists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe.” The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which at a cost of $10 billion seemed rather a lot of money merely for the purpose of accelerating particles and letting protons collide, has now produced data considered by exulting physicists to be “‘a historic milestone’” (qtd. in Overbye). Although the triumphant reports were immediately qualified by the admission that no certain identification is as yet possible, most physicists [End Page 161] seem to be convinced they have detected the subatomic Higgs boson, the particle that is “predicted to imbue elementary particles with mass.” Here the description becomes interesting:

Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very much like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed in the boson for half a century without ever seeing it. The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws—but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.

Let us overlook the hardly empiricist language of “a rendezvous with destiny” on the part of “believe[rs]” who have long been convinced of a physical substance “without ever seeing it,” and just pass on to that central law of the universe according to our most advanced physicists—a law proclaiming that “everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in . . . symmetry.” When reading these words for the first time in the newspaper, I was not yet thinking of Lucretius, who is not among my usual mental inhabitants. More predictably, my mind flashed to Stevens’ one-liner “The imperfect is our paradise,” and the subsequent claim that “delight, / Since the imperfect is so hot in us, / Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds” (CPP 179). Not an entirely inappropriate association, perhaps, but at first sight still something of a stretch. Clearly, my narrative has work to do before such a juxtaposition becomes more than happenstance. So let us continue to read Mr. Overbye’s brave explanation:

According to the Standard Model [i.e., today’s central theory in physics—I am not aware we have anything of the sort in contemporary literary criticism], the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues...

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