by Jake Levine
I think at this point we can acknowledge that something in the universe is broken. I don’t know if a switch has been flipped off or maybe we need to replace a bulb or something, but things are not normal. We live in a world where the President of the United States is being sued by a former porn star, a 10 year old kid famous for yodeling in a Walmart (the illustrious Mason Ramsey) performed at Coachella and has just released a single, Nazis are crawling out of every hole and crevice in their mom’s basement and Taco Bell still doesn’t deliver. Nothing matters anymore and everything is a dumpster fire that has spread beyond control.
Attempting to understand our current reality seems to be futile and would likely be nothing short of a circuitous and unintelligible path that would bring whatever seeker of knowledge full-circle back to where they started. With that in mind, the only way to understand the unintelligible is to abandon reason and logic and think divergently, and in that regard, I plan on abandoning all concepts of logic and reason here. To put it simply, Kanye West’s recent Twitter flurry has exposed us to the truth: the Large Hadron Collider offset reality when we discovered the Higgs Boson Particle in 2012 and now we’re living in a warped version of reality.
On July 4, 2012, a group of scientists in Geneva essentially slammed two beams of protons together and discovered a particle matching Higgs Boson, the aptly named “God Particle” that acted as the fuse that set off the explosion that created the universe. Everything around us – neutrons, protons, electrons, atoms themselves – are a byproduct of such a particle, and it can be understood as triggering existence itself. The identification of this particle has allowed us to begin the process of quantifying it, which would give us glimpse into the moment of creation. Moreover, Higgs Boson has the potential of allowing us to identify the presence of different universes; realities existing either before the Big Bang or parallel to our own. With Higgs Boson, there seem to be endless possibilities.
Yet that fateful day in 2012 was not just one of significance for the scientific community. There were serious concerns raised, as there was a genuine fear that experimentation with the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva would rip open a black hole on earth and kill us all. Scientists were quick to assuage the fears of the public and obviously, they were correct in their reassurances. But what if something else happened? What if in exposing the fabric of creation, we messed things up, infusing what was meant to exist separately into our own universe and somehow mixed up realities? After all, are we really to believe that a world where Kanye West, of “College Dropout” fame, would join sides with the likes of Donald Trump and Peter Thiel?
Consider the oddity of events since 2012 and tell me whether or not you think something is fundamentally up: 2013 – the pope resigned for the first time in over 500 years; 2014 – Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared over the Pacific Ocean; 2015 – NASA announces that liquid water had been on Mars at one point; 2016 – the Chicago Cubs won the World Series after a 108 year wait; and 2017 – and Slobodan Praljak, after being sentenced by an internal tribunal, proceeded to commit suicide by poison in the courtroom. This brings us to 2018, where Kanye West went from tweeting “we live in a society…” every other hour to tweeting about the “dragon blood” he and Donald Trump, the president of the United States, share. What else explains this, other than the fact that we are living in a reality infused with another.
There’s a scene in The Matrix when Neo, the film’s protagonist, finds himself ripped from the world he thought he knew and forced to confront a perturbing and disorientating reality. In the process of attempting to comprehend the truth of what lies before him, he passes out in a pile of his own vomit, unable to handle what he has been forced to accept as the truth. We are like Neo, lying in our own vomit as we attempt to comprehend what is happening before our eyes. We only have ourselves to blame, because our actions with the Higgs Boson particle in 2012 intertwined our reality with some clusterfuck that was living parallel to us. This is the logical equivalent of a snake biting its own tail, infinitely trapping itself in its own contortion. God help us all.
Jake is a junior History major with a double minor in French and Art History
Graphic by Ryman Curtis
