For the first time in my life, on Tuesday I visited Oxford University, to be treated to small helpings of digestible science from a handful of the physics students there at this point in time. The evening was delightful. Some of the presenters may go on to unravel some of the deepest mysteries of the Universe. Some of the things they said resonated with me, and some made me smile inside. The struggle was the same for me, though, as it's always been at colloquiums and symposiums, with the overriding reliance on constants; the same old thoughts leading to the same old results, and a stampede of empty horses bravely towing bright chariots of promise.

I learned that the LUX experiment, squatting deep underground like a giant metallic Tellytubby on a hunt for Dark Matter, has enjoyed not one sniff of anything in the time it has been running. I asked what the expected signature of a Dark Matter particle was anticipated to be (it seems I was allowed to ask questions here - very refreshing!). The young lady speaker explained that there would be a flash if a Dark Matter particle collided with a particle of Xenon, the noble gas filling the trapping chamber. "So you're expecting some form of photoelectric effect?" I enquired, just to be sure. "Well, yes," she replied. "Has there been any incident at all?" asked someone else a minute later. "Well, no," said the young lady with a hint of forlorn. So, this expansive experiment has been set up to trap Dark Matter, but it expects a collision to produce Light. Maybe the Tellytubby's track is a little off-course, I thought, but of course I didn't say so. This is Oxford University.

Another speaker, who went on to win the vote for Best Presentation, explained that Einstein, in his ‘great blunder' over light and quantum mechanics, had left behind a new Constant in the form of Dark Energy. Light, it seemed, was no longer reliable enough to be the Universal Constant. There had to be a better contender. And although no-one has the faintest idea what it actually is, they've decided that Dark Energy is the bus that drives the Universe in its infinite expansion. So Dark Energy has seemingly been ordained as the new Cosmological Constant, and long may it reign.

So here I now sit, on what apparently is Science Friday, the eve of Midsummer, wondering whether the digging for WIMPs and the probing for Axions is really going to lead to anything meaningful, querying if the clues aren't being waved bravely in front of our noses where we're very much not looking. For if there's any particle in the Universe that diligently respects every quantum principle going, and conforms to every single one of the laws nobody is ever expected to understand, that particle is the Electron. Most minute of particles, most undeterminable, most widely talked-about and yet not even in the line-up of suspects for Dark Matter, there it sits, negatively charged, the particle that makes our Universe everything we perceive. We like to think all electrons are the same. But then, we made that mistake with snowflakes for a very long time indeed. The electron dances along with the Photon (a 'shadow version' of which was a casual DM suspect at Invisibles), which lets us see the everything we perceive, for without the Photon, of course, there would only be Darkness, and that would never do.

Someone else can do the math. There are as usual more stories behind the pictures.

"The things you are passionate about are not random, they're your calling."  Fabienne Frederickson





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Scientists won't ask you "what you mean by that". They'll (generally) tell you the next part of their theory that they're going to assure you somehow fits with what it was you just said. This is also the problem with ‘religious' people. They want you to fit in their velvet box, and you don't, so you can go to Hell, the reality of being stuck in a negatively charged Universe with nowhere to run to somehow escaping even the most sane of scholastic people. The trouble with the two camps is basically that the similarities override the most basic of coincidences, the mirror, the same mirror that we face against a world that's just a reflection of your own.

So you're reading this, and perhaps beginning to question where you are. That's one half of the UP fulfilled, then. Uncertainty being what it is, it's Principle won't be far behind. When you then find yourself wondering where you're going, then the other side is satisfied. Break out of the constants, and suddenly there aren't any constraints. Chicken, egg, rock, hard place... Whiplash. Sting a bit? Mmmm. Life, like cake. Short and sweet, they say/don't forget the currents.

Tonight, sitting in MaryAnne's house watching David Beckham hacking his way through an Amazon rainforest adventure that carefully skirted around the slash'n'burn, logging and oil pollution, I realised how much synchronicity had been crashing in over the last two days, and how I'd been bemoaning its absence some time shortly before that. June 9th was yesterday, and June 9th has a significance (to me). This evening, the thought struck home as to what synchronicity might actually be. And that was a pretty powerful resonance. The sense it made was intense. It made sense not only of the sensation of synchronicity itself, but the reason it happens, and the reason we have the funny feeling there's something vaguely magical about it.

Synchronicity hits our reality in short moments, and we forget them fast unless they're really, really strong and hit us hard. Like dreams, most of the time they flit by forgotten but something that has a big impact might just get remembered, and the ones we remember are the ones that turned out to have that big impact we had the feeling they'd have at the time. So that's the reality, as far as it goes, in our perception, and there we generally stop, with a little question mark over our minds and nothing more.

Advanced waves come at us from the future, retarded waves smack us from the past. Where they meet is the present, where we live. But we're not alone, of course, and what other people/things/planets do has an impact on what happens to us. What if, when something of magnitude happens on another timeline, we ride an advanced/retarded set of ripples which have created a standing wave? It only would be there for a moment, as we are constantly travelling through time, but at times of choppiness, with lots of events happening round our timeline to potentially affect us like rainfall on a pond, there would be lots of these standing waves cropping up at once. Once in a while, some big fish might jump in the pond to smack us across the face with its tail, and we get a big significance which somehow we recognise as being big, even though we've no idea why it happened. 

Two events colliding in our own timeline, pushed together by the impact of the standing-wave effect, would make past and future merge into two events which are intrinsically instantly connected, simply because it has to be that way - the past and future are crossing at a standing point, balanced for a moment without movement. The important thing from our point of view, if this scenario is correct, is that when we get smacked with a major synchronicity something big has flopped into our ocean and we are likely to get something from it at some point in time. Like a radar beacon flashing across our world line, synchronicity is there to prove that everything is truly, genuinely, intimately connected and we have every right to trust that there's a bigger picture, and some kind of plan - whether or not there's anyone to master it being irrelevant, the significance being only that a master plan there is. Ballerina's skirt, eh? With some guy looking up it, I guess. 

Synchronicity and dreamscape probably have lots in common, just as quarks and neutrinos do. We sleep, we dream, we wake up again.

What is loveable about all this stuff is that it might actually be true. If it is, then there's no fluffy-bunny cosiness about a belief system that's constantly open to re-interpretation. There's absolutely no constant to worry about because the universe just doesn't work like that. What's the point of laying constants in the face of uncertainty?


The Uncertainty Principle'll just tread all over them and do exactly what it wants, which won't ever be the same as what it did before.