And quiet flows the Don

Driving into Toronto from the east, the fastest way to get downtown is to peel off the 401 and head south on the Don Valley Parkway. Built upon what must once have been a verdant river valley, the DVP is six lanes of furiously buzzing expressway that splits the downtown core like a chainsaw through old wood. Splinter roads fly up the Don Valley’s ravines, singeing the adjacent neighbourhoods with diesel fumes. The floor of the valley itself is cluttered with bricky remains, railroad tracks and tire parts. It is space so befouled that even bridges span the whole cut rather than touch any part of the valley floor.

There is what is optimistically referred to as “park land” in the valley: garbage-strewn paths cut up and down the ravines, skirting around power lines, cement dams and piles of half-burnt clothing. There are bike trails along the rails, and arthritic willows upon which crows and grackles roost among tattered grocery bags.

Years ago the Don River was aggressively trimmed to make room for first the railroad and then the Parkway. What’s left of it is a canal; dutifully it conveys runoff from the ravines, along with assorted urban spillage, down through the valley, past the brickworks, factory lofts and storage elevators, dipping under the Gardiner Expressway and then finally spewing out into Lake Ontario. The river is sick-kidney-coloured, needing dialysis, pumping unfiltered ooze into the guts of the city.

I work on River Street, which, as you might guess, is a road that runs parallel to the river, and although I also live west, ongoing construction causes me to have to take an odd route to and from work each day. As a result, I cross the valley twice a day on the streetcar - either the 505 across the Gerrard Street Bridge, or the 504, which crosses on Dundas. I have been doing this for almost two months now: coming and going, morning and night, I look out upon the valley, and although I have noticed the slight mist of panic and despair rising up from the Parkway (it’s hard not to!), I can’t say I had ever really looked at the river.

But yesterday, even though it’s still bloody cold and wet out, I decided to walk across the Gerrard Street bridge. Stopping in the middle, I looked south toward the lake, following the stream of the water. The northbound lanes of the Parkway were clogged with drive-home commuters, while the southbound lanes moved slightly faster as they force-fed dinner-goers into the downtown core. I leaned over the railing and watched stuff float out from under the bridge: a coffee cup, a plastic bag, something pink.

And then I realized there were swans on the river. Two of them sailed by going south, gliding around the broken willow branches and crumbling bollards that line the western bank. I looked down the river and saw another swan and a family of ducks, paddling upriver along the eastern bank. The funny thing is, the birds were in the proper lanes. Keeping right, maintaining a proper distance, the two groups passed without incident as I looked on wishing I had a camera.

Telling James about it last night, I wondered if the Parkway, with its relentless controlled flow of traffic, had imprinted on those poor birds. Is it possible that living alongside six lanes of mayhem had trained the swans and ducks in the waterfowl equivalent of keeping three chevrons back?

Just to be sure, I went back today with my camera. This time, I walked from east to west across the bridge. It was around 11:30 in the morning, so the Parkway traffic wasn’t as intense. Alas, there weren’t many birds in the water. Just a couple of swans, hanging out in an eddy pool near the bank.

I took a couple of pictures anyway.

Keeping it all together

It’s been a while since I went off on a physics riff, more than a year. In that year, my brain has off-loaded what seems like a significant amount of archived information. For example, I can’t remember what I was so mad about all those times, and I have probably forgotten your phone number. Likewise, I’ve misplaced the names of a number of world capitols, and one or more of the tent poles. Whoever sang that irritating song, thank goodness, I’ve forgotten that too.

But on the upside, as a result of the dumping of world capitols etc, I have a little brain-space for goings-on in the world of physics - and how timely! - because there are goings-on of major note.

See, they’ve built a Big Bang machine in a tunnel in Switzerland. Actually, the Large Hadron Collider is kind of old news, its construction having begun twenty years ago. But with this machine, which resembles a huge, shaggy Ferris Wheel that’s fallen into a mine shaft, the great minds at CERN intend to fire off a whack of protons at hitherto unseen speeds from opposite ends of the tunnel, and when they meet, they will collide with the force of energy present at the birth of the universe – the Big Bang.

But that ain’t all: when these protons collide at very nearly light speed, the hope is that the collision will knock loose a God particle, and that someone in the lab will, figuratively at least, be able to pick it up and dust it off and take a good look at it.

Also known as the Higgs boson, the theoretical God particle has the unenviable job of literally gluing together all the bits and pieces, as well as the non-bits and non-pieces, that make up the Standard Model of an atom. It’s the particle that confers mass upon quarks and leptons, which in turn bunch together to form neutrons, protons and electrons, which then gang up in the shape of atoms and molecules, which then… well, you get the picture. Which then make the universe as we know it.

So why is this important? Because even though we have Standard Models and Periodic Tables and spectroscopes and red shift and we can tell just by looking what the stars and planets are made of, there’s all that pesky in between stuff, the so-called “fabric” of space, that’s all invisible and undetectable and comprises 96% of everything that’s out there (and in here). Which is another way of saying that 96% of the universe isn't there. But what’s not there, in case you’re quite reasonably wondering, can’t be just “nothing”. We know that there is some kind of dark thingy (dark matter, dark energy) at play, gluing the universe together, because we can plainly see galaxies and whatnot flying around in space that by all rights should come completely unhinged, given the amount of detectable matter they’re made of, and the speeds they are traveling at. And yet, they don’t. Something keeps them together, those galaxies. Something that’s so inherent in everything that it’s like the hand of God – thus, it’s called the God particle.

And if this particle shows up, then wow, it also kind of proves Einstein’s “theory of everything”, which nowadays is mostly referred to as “supersymmetry”. See, Einstein figured out a lot of stuff about how elementary particles work, and how the really gigantic cosmos works, and of course being a physicist he had the day-to-day down-here-on-Earth itself wired, but the rules for one (particles) didn’t make any sense in the Newtonian sphere, and then again in the greater cosmos rules that should be true on Earth were not true for gigantic bodies in space. And so the physics world said, by way of not very good explanation, “More is different”. And Einstein spent the last years of his career trying to come up with a theory of how and why more is different, how big things are connected to little things, and how the rule-shift works. That’s supersymmetry. It’s sort of like when you want to make a double-batch of muffins, you can’t just double everything in the original recipe: if you’re a decent baker you know that there are some things in the recipe that you can double, and some things you have to tweak a bit. Why? No one knows. At least, not me: I’m a famously crap baker. It has to do with some ingredients responding differently in large volume that others, I guess.

In the case at hand (detecting the God particle), the existence of the God particle goes a very, very long way to explaining how mass grabs hold of some subatomic particles and not others. If it can explain that, then it can also help explain how gravity works, because that’s a stumper for physicists as well, even though there is mostly a connection between mass and gravity – you can’t have one without the other – unless you can - and sometimes that’s the case and oh, crap.

Sometimes I think about all this and I am almost convinced that I understand it. And then I realize that I am full of shit and I don’t get it one little bit. But I will tell you this: I have my own “theory of everything” that explains why galaxies don’t bust apart in space even when they should, or why some particles leap out of dark holes while light itself gets sucked away in a thin white line. This same theory also explains why you often feel you’ve known a person forever, even though you’ve just met, and why I love my husband with all my heart, and also why I can always find Timmy’s keys, even over the phone, and why some places in the world make us cry because they are so beautiful and strange and yet feel so much like home.

Here goes: Once, everything that there was, would be, and is now, was a singularity. This singularity was either tiny or enormous, but it doesn’t matter because, being a singularity, it was all there was and therefore no scale could measure it. And something happened to blow this singularity apart, a Big Bang, and when it did, the universe suddenly thundered into being. The singularity turned itself inside out, if you like, and disgorged a blob of plasma, which then cooled and expanded (or expanded and cooled) into shapes like galaxies and supernovas and stars and sunsets and planets and mountains and hospitals and tractors and people. All of the things the universe became (and is still becoming!) are made out of the same plasma goop, which just nanoseconds before becoming plasma had been snug as a bug, side by each, packed into this singularity. All the stuff that makes up your foot, my desk, Pluto, Nebula 375, were all once the same singular “thing”. And all that dark energy, dark matter, invisible stuff was there too. In my theory, that dark stuff (which you can call gravity if you like) I simply think of as “the universe’s collective memory of being together”. In other words, all the stuff in the universe was together once, and now, that “oneness” is as much a dimension of the universe as are mass, volume, and time.

Thus it follows that everything that exists (even in theory!) has oneness, and the job of oneness is to be oneness, and to never let you go, no matter how hard you strain to break apart.