Easter 2015 and the Son of God Particle

  Illustration: Elena Caldera

After being used to locate the God Particle
The Hadron Collider was given a rest,
With two and a half years for refurbishment
Before being put back to the test.

It’s now hoped that it’s been re-equipped
To explore Dark Energy and Dark Matter;
Super-symmetricality and strange dimensions
With its radically re-booted atom smasher.

Its proton beams can now be fired at each other
In twenty mile tunnels at the speed of light,
Being charged up with 13 trillion electro-volts
As they race round the collider’s circular pipe –

Seeking out dark matter whose rumoured web
Holds everything visible in place;
It’s the reason galaxies spin faster than they should
As they hurtle through infinite space.

The Hadron Collider’s the biggest machine ever built
With its superconducting dipole magnets
Generating a field 100,000 times stronger than earth
In a vacuum that serves as a dragnet.

To understand his place in the universe
Man’s recreating the Big Bang
By melting atom parts in temperatures
A million times hotter than the Sun.

Man’s created a dense form of primordial matter –
Something called quark-gluon plasma –
Even denser than if the world’s population was compressed
Into something the size of a cube of sugar.

In his search for the ultimate ‘force carriers’
And for subatomic building blocks
Man hopes that he’ll see every single one
Of nature’s secrets unlocked.

The discoveries of physics become weirder and weirder
Seeming to obey no known laws.
One mysterious particle is called “the anti-beauty quark”.
It would greet the opening of the Hadron’s doors.

The high point of the Hadron Collider’s career
Has obviously been the God particle
But the Easter Day’s reopening hints at a sequel,
At another mind-blowing article.

The God particle’s property was its ability
To turn light into solid matter.
Could there now be a Christ particle in the wings
Ready to give atheists the horrors?

And if so, what would its properties be?
Would they be the same as its namesake?
Imagine Christ particles let loose on the One Percent:
Erasing their fortunes at a keystroke.

Imagine airborne Christ particles attacking Wall Street,
Penetrating algorithms in its mainframe computers;
Moving columns of figures from the rich to the poor
And bankrupting its hedgefund looters.

Such particles could enter the air conditioning
For bankers to inhale them with each breath.
The penny drops. They can’t go on as before.
“We must save the homeless from death!”

Instead of their sneering as they pass them by
And complaining about their smell,
The bankers feed them; wash the feet of the poor
And save them from capitalism’s hell.

What if the Hadron Collider sprang a leak,
Releasing clouds of sub-atomic Messiahs,
For a peacenik whirlwind to rip into the Pentagon
And place its weapons on a funeral pyre?

It’d be the Second Coming in an omnipresent form
With spirit particles unconstrained by time,
Giving permission to live life on a higher level
With all of matter containing the sublime.

Heathcote Williams

With thanks to Dave Lawton and Martin Maw