Blowing Up the TV Meets the Large Hadron Collider

The Universe Next Door / 2018 / Mixed media collage / Russell C. Smith

Quantumly speaking, things are out of whack in the Multiverse. At least for now. And yet, rain falling on the deck is comforting as the sound of rain often is. Our deck has sprouts of grass growing upward. Reaching up through cracks in between the white wooden planks. According to TV weather people, it’ll be raining all day today. Springtime rains are a distant cousin to summertime rains. Thunder shakes the sky, and lightning will surprise the hairs on the back of your neck at the strangest times. As I recall, we were having tuna fish sandwiches with potato chips for lunch when I was a kid, and a late August thunderstorm barreled in across Tampa Bay. Usually there was enough time to run into the living room and unplug the TV. Not on that day. After three of the loudest closest rumbling thunder cracks in a row I’d ever heard, lightning struck the antennae on our roof and spiraled downwards through our house’s wiring, exploding through the cord connecting our TV to electricity, and blowing it up. Seconds later, running from the kitchen with my mouth full of tuna sandwich bites and chip fragments, in a shocked daze, I was pulling the TV away from the wall. We were awestruck at the big black burn mark the lightning had haphazardly smudged on the wall, and I unplugged our connection to Televisionland after it was too late. Not realizing it, I’d witnessed a Quantum moment – lightning had blasted directly into our house. We’d had a visit from an elemental force of nature. It certainly wasn’t the usual aunt, neighbor, or friend dropping by to say hi – this was a living breathing statement of electricity in action. It made the Ben Franklin tale we’d been told in school, about flying a kite during a thunderstorm with a key attached seem cute, by comparison. In the 1960s we were decades away from the Large Hadron Collider, which jumped onto the world stage in 2008, and next made news when Higgs boson particles were discovered in 2012 – and shown to be Quantumly-cool particles like no other. Fast forward to now,  and trillions and trillions of protons have collided with each other on the most expensive circular underground racetrack ever built for particle collision. Located underneath the Switzerland and France borders, where the scientists are in search of dark matter particles. As one does. Moving proton particles around at the speed of light, what could go wrong. A few online articles from several years ago speculated on how a Black Hole could accidentally be formed by the Large Hadron Collider. Other articles were quick to refute, and say, nah, that’ll never happen. We’re already living in a world where the existence of alien beings has finally officially been verified by the United States government. Way back in 1905, in Einstein’s Miracle Year, when he wrote the Theory of Relativity, the world was already living in a Quantum speed of light cosmic experience world. We just didn’t know it yet. Albert Einstein, in a matter of months wrote several world-shifting scientific papers clearly showing the world we lived in a Quantum Universe, where things like the speed of light must be considered. Although, I wasn’t considering any of this on the rainy day when our television set blew up. I went into my bedroom and found some drawing paper. Then I drew about five or six versions of the lightning coming through the wires inside our house and blasting directly through the wall, into the TV’s picture tube, and blowing Televisionland to smithereens.