God particle sheds no light on God but lots on Wally

I am sure that by now you have heard of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle. What many people fail to understand is the political significance of this breakthrough in particle physics.

But first let me set your mind at rest.

• Tony Abbott has not denied the existence of the Higgs boson.
• As yet the Gillard Government does not have any plans to tax Higgs boson emissions.
• While some Greens do advocate boycotting the Higgs boson party leader Christine Milne denies that this is official party policy.
• For now the Occupy Higgs movement will not be disrupting traffic in any state capital.
• In the US it appears the Higgs boson will be a non-issue in the forthcoming elections although Sarah Palin denounced Obama for allowing French bosons to permeate American mass.

With that out of the way let's get down to the nitty gritty of Higgs boson physics and how it affects the political universe.

What is mass?

From the perspective of a physicist mass is about oomph. "Oomph" is a technical term meaning push or shove. The more massive an object the more oomph it takes to get it moving. It takes a lot of oomph to get a train moving compared to a bicycle. If cricket balls were as massive as the Queen Mary 2 hitting a six would be impossible. No batsman could provide the necessary oomph.

But why should this be? Why should some things require a lot of oomph while others, like marbles, require hardly any oomph at all?

Well, there are two ways to figure this out.

• One way is to delve into a lot of complicated equations with funny symbols.
• The other way is to pretend to be a fish.

I am a fish person and this is a fishy explanation.

So imagine you are a fish. As a fish you are well adapted to a watery environment. Your streamlined shape enables you to cut through the water easily. It takes very little oomph to get you moving. In fact you are so well adapted to water that you are not really aware of its existence.

But let us suppose you are a fish with a scientific bent, a veritable piscine Einstein. You notice that going forwards requires very little oomph while trying to move sideways requires a lot. You discover that it is easier to push fish-shaped objects than squat ones.

You also notice that sometimes you appear to be moving relative to the seabed even when you are trying to keep still. In fact sometimes it takes oomph just to remain where you are.

You speculate that a mysterious "field" that you dub a water field permeates the entire universe. This water field is made up of tiny particles that you call molecules. Whenever you move you have push these molecules aside. Some shapes, especially fishy shapes, slide past these little molecules more easily than squat ones. The reason why it sometimes takes oomph to remain in the same place is because there are currents within the water field which can push you along.

You present your ideas to the Piscine Physics Professors and are made PPP of the year. Even those mammalian intruders in the maritime environment, the dolphins and whales, applaud your scientific genius.

Well, in simple terms that what the Higgs boson is about. In the early 1960s Peter Higgs speculated that a field, later called the Higgs field, permeated the entire universe. It was interactions with the Higgs field that gave particles their mass. Some particles, like the electron and its associated neutrino, are fish shaped or streamlined, so Higgs, speculated, and cut through the Higgs field as easily as a fish through water. Other particles, like the proton and the neutron, are more "squat" and find it more difficult to cut through the Higgs field.

Photons, the particles that make up light, are an extreme case of streamlining. In fact they're Teflon coated. They whizz through the Higgs field at the maximum possible speed without needing any oomph at all.

We have mass because we're made up of lots of protons and neutrons that interact very strongly with the Higgs field.

(See also: What is a Higgs boson?)

But what, you may say, does this have to do with politics?

Well it turns out that there is another field that permeates the universe called the "Wally field." Some people, Albert Einstein is a fine example, are very streamlined in "Wally space." They can slide past the Wally particles very easily.

But some unfortunates have a squat shape in "Wally space". They interact very strongly with Wally particles. Such people are known as Wallies.

Note that Wallies are not stupid. The Urban Dictionary defines a Wally as:

..someone who is very intelligent in some areas but very stupid (almost unbelievably) in others..

There is an important difference between the Higgs field and the Wally field. The Higgs field, so far as we know, is uniform throughout space. However the Wally field, like the water field, has currents that carry Wallies just as currents in the water field carry fish.

Amazingly we have been able to map some of the currents. We know that there are strong Wally currents moving to and from Canberra. In fact Canberra seems to be a sort of nexus for Wally currents. Other nexuses identified so far are Washington DC and Brussels in Belgium.

The next project for the LHC is the detection of the Wally field boson. This task has been entrusted to the OPERA team that thought they had detected faster-than-light neutrinos. It is thought there is a particularly dense field of Wally bosons in the vicinity of their equipment.

It remains to give the Wally field boson a nice, snappy name and it's not going to be the Meyer boson. While I would never deny my own Walliness I am not going to have it immortalised by lending my name to the Wally boson. I have my pride.

My first thought was to call it the Z boson in honour of the president of my native country, Jacob Zuma, a Wally par excellence. However it turns out there already is a Z boson. It's one of the three bosons that transmit the weak nuclear force.

In any case, I feel my adopted country deserves some recognition. I have decided to call it the BAG boson in honour of three great contemporary Australian Wallies, Bob Brown, Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard.

The project to detect the BAG boson will be called the General Advanced Reaction BAG Experiment or garBAGe