Transubstantiation
Nothing more than the accelerator
at Cern, seven-mile tunnel in the earth,
protons traveling almost at the speed of light,
voilà. Top quark, alpha god particle
said they would be there, though makes no sense.
Blood & bread. Take, this is my. . .
Not more mysterious than something
a millionth the size of a proton.
Physicists explain how it will act, react.
They say with a flourish what they don’t
understand. PhDs argue online in secret
chats where the one defensible
posture remains: ungovernable
squirm of subatomic world, wafer.
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Editor’s Notes and Image Credit: This is an American sonnet and the complementing image of a typical CMS* event displaying the Higgs boson decaying to four leptons with 2 muons (in red) and 2 electrons (in green) as final state signatures. The event was recorded with the CMS detector in 2012 at a proton-proton center of mass energy of 8 TeV. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of the SM Higgs boson to a pair of photons (dashed yellow lines and green towers). (Image: CERN)
* The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It has a broad physics program ranging from studying the Standard Model (including the Higgs boson) to searching for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.
- Transubstantiation by Judith Skillman - April 19, 2022