Grand Unification — Angela Brett at Open Mic on JoCo Cruise 2019
Channel: Angela Brett
Date: 2019-04-11

My not-so-lame claim to fame is that I used to be a code monkey at CERN. CERN does a whole lot of cool things (like 1.7 kelvins) One of them is discovering the Higgs boson, which has to do with how particles get mass. Basically the Large Hadron Collider accelerates positive protons (and sometimes lead ions) to really high energies and collides them to see what happens, and if you get them to really high energies the fundamental forces of matter start to behave the same, and at really really really high energies, all four of them combine in what’s called grand unification. One of the other things CERN does, and the reason it was founded after World War two, is get European scientists to work together to try *not* to destroy the world. CERN has 22 member states, and many other nations involved in some way. This poem is about all of those things.

You might think that we’re just doing science
With our hadron collider so large.
But we’ve built this electric alliance
to give weight to our positive charge.

Take researchers from every nation,
Let the humans within them collide.
We will find the grand unification
when we see we’re all on the same side.

And with ev’ry race, tongue and religion
we’ll find how to give all the world mass.
If we’d all interact just a smidgen
with the openness through which we pass

we’d see life’s ups and downs become charming and strange,
when we face them head on, and what’s more,
seeking beauty and truth we can make a big change
with small change from the purses of war.

Take the light at the end of the tunnel,
and ensure it goes all the way round,
to illuminate more than the sun’ll,
and enlighten with what we have found:

When you’ve unresolved matters, understanding runs thin,
you face too many forces to name,
if you cut out the din, and put energy in,
it turns out that we’re all just the same.

The performances I’m allowed to share from this open mic will be in https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ-l6mr1dW0gfnGY7R2rXV__qRmtHmToH