Croutons: The Missing Pieces To My Particle Thesis

My elementary particle thesis, reknowned for its unassuming, idiosynchratic, out-on-a-whim nature, has finally coalesced, congealed, conglomerated--coagulated even--into a cohesive, coherent hole.....er......whole. Up to this point (though, due to the very variegated nature of the elementary particles in question, I hesitate to say "point", making the mistake of assuming that any one of them can be said to occupy some "point" in space and some "point" in time simultaneously [which is to say "here and now" or "there and then"] with any degree of certainty. With that in mind, physically, and bearing in mind also the supposed "unassuming" nature of my thesis, grammatically, it behooves me not to ramble on about the impossibilities of a grammar ever accurately representing reality, which is what I was about to do.....did.)--But nonetheless, up to this 'point' of statistical probability within the time-space/psychical continuum, I had been happy, as had others, to populate my world with the little goblins, gremlins, and ghosts we call "electrons, protons, and neutrons".

Then, I was playing billiards one day, when, I watched my perfectly Englished cue ball (how's that for spaking thusly Zarathustra?)--my perfectly Englished cue ball--skip off the rail at an exaggeratedly obtuse angle in order to avoid one ball, bounce off a second rail, just nicking the eight ball for what would be a glorious, game winning shot in the corner pocket. Well, that's how it was supposed to work. Instead, and much to my eternal annoyance, as the eight ball slowly and steadily crept toward the pocket, it was pulled--as if by some magical magnetic force--toward the rail and just askew of its expected trajectory.

After cussing up one side and down the other, while my opponent summarily finished off what was left of his balls and the conveniently placed eight ball, I gave a thorough inspection to the soundness of the table. It was perfectly fit. And so I concluded that it must have been some sort of an abberration in the heretofore incompletely understood physical (and psychical)universe.

Nothing short of a eureka! moment for me, I jogged my memory of the exact scenario, trying to figure out what had transpired. I went through all the variables and constants. Then, I conducted some crude observational experiments. And the one thing that stuck out more than anything else was the waitress's hindquarters. But(t) the actions and influences of heavenly bodies had already been explained satisfactorily by the likes of Galileo, Keplar, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein--among others. So it couldn't have been her backside that caused the abberration. Ample, but(t) not enough mass.

Then, I had another eureka! moment. I saw the very same waitress vaccuuming with a Eureka brand vaccuum. And I thought of how nature abhors a vaccuum. Since events do not happen in a vaccuum, there must be a reason why she would walk by me. There must be some causality. After some serious deliberation, I figured the waitress was not merely walking by just to give me a look at her transcendental behind. No. She was, in fact, delivering salads all night to the dining area which lay beyond the game room. And that was precisely the direction in which the ball's path was skewed. Each time one of us took a shot while she was delivering a salad, the ball would gravitate, without fail, toward the salad.

I ordered the salad.

All the while, I dared not let on to the others what I was up to. Placing the salad near the corner of my choice, I hoped to turn that pocket into a veritable black hole. So long as I got the ball in its proximity, the game was mine. Funny, I thought, how a light and refreshing appetizer could be the long sought-after "dark matter" that would eventually cause the universe to collapse back onto itself causing another "Big Bang" and creating new worlds again and again, ad infinitum; or rather, if you don't prefer existence or salads, ad nauseam.

The game was progressing nicely in my favor as my hypothesis teetered on the brink of full-fledged theory. I beamed at the prospect of every pencil-necked geek memorizing the name of Jor Jazzar next to the likes of Einstein and Newton. And I also took a fancy to the night's potential take-home purse in hustled winnings. But, much to my astonishment, at some critical point the fledgling failed to fly. And it was my opponent that was sinking shot after shot--not in my corner--but in the opposite corner.

Something was terribly wrong. Did I overlook a dual-natured beast in favor of an over-simplified theory? Did the salad have a "push" as well as a "pull" factor? Did I eat too much of it, diminishing and diluting its concentrated energy and proximal force? Was the real power in the vinagrette?

It was then that I noticed a sinister smirk on my opponent's face as he sunk the eight ball in that dark, foreboding, heavy pocket. And I looked beyond that wretched mark with a plumb line to the shadowy table that held his leaden Guiness brew and the little black bag of lightly seasoned croutons which I had gladly relinquished to him halfway through the game upon his oleaginous request thinking him none the wiser to my saladified plans. My grimace was complete.

In his black garb, he explained to me in condescending terms how I'd underestimated the "dark side of the Force"; how I'd put too much faith in "light and refreshing things"; how the prequel Star Wars movies were no comparison to the originals. He claimed, in rather uber-trekkie fashion, that he derived special powers from the color black and all things dark, that the synergy of dark elements--Guiness beer, his gothic makeup and outfit, the shadowy table, the eight ball, the dark pockets, and the little black bag of croutons--had combined to give him an "edgy-edge" over my "lame, white ass".

We settled our bets; he made some perfunctory remarks, turned to walk away, and to make a point of his so-called black magical powers, threw the little black bag to me as if to rub it in how he'd used my own croutons against me. Reflexively, I caught the little bag. And reflectively, I thought of my miscalculations.

How could I have been so wrong, I wondered. It could not have been a coincidence what I had seen. And the last thing I'd believe was that guy's "black magic" bullcrap. What a crock! What nonsense! I hadn't heard superstitious, speculative mumbo-jumbo like that since reading that book by the Warren Commission.

I was thinking about the scienctific truths that could account for the anomalous shots (my billiard shots, not Oswald's bookish suppository or whatever) as I was sort of absent-mindedly turning the little bag over in my hands again and again. You have objects. Objects are composed of molecules. Molecules are made up of atoms. Then, you have atoms that are made up of sub-atomic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Aside from the more rarified particles like neutrinos, quarks, bosons, and the like, protons, neutrons, and electrons account for more than 99.9 per cent of the universe's mass. The more massive an object, the stronger its gravitational force if you're assuming two objects at a fixed distance. There were other forces though: the electormagnetic force, the weak force (holds electrons to atoms), and the strong force (holds protons and neutrons together). I was turning them over again and again in my head.

I'll grant George Lucas his right and proper due credit and call all of these forces collectively "The Force", though it's something a little different from what the movies depict. Instead, let it be the collective forces that we know act on physical objects. Then, how come the aberration of billiard balls? Their skewed paths cannot be accounted for by the known forces. Is there another, mysterious force out there acting upon them, I asked myself.

Still turning the bag over in my hands, and still turning the elementary particles over in my head, and still meditating on the transcendental nature of the waitress's buttocks, I chanted in mantric tones their names:

...electrons...protons...neutrons...

...electrons...protons...neutrons...

...electrons...protons...neutrons...voluptuous buttocks

...electrons...protons...neutrons...voluptuous buttocks

...electrons...protons...neutrons...voluptuous buttocks...little black bag of...of...of...little black bag of...CROUTONS!!!

Of course!! That's it! How did I not see it before?! Electrons, protons, neutrons, little black bag of croutons! It was the croutons that had exerted the additional force on the billiard balls, not the waitress's transcendental behind, not the salad, and not any of the other known universal forces.

This was the fabled "dark matter" of physics lore, the missing particles. And their force (dare I say the "dark side of The Force?") is most likely the force that has been behind so many of our unsolved mysteries: the Bermuda Triangle (those planes must have had too many croutons on board), the man who bends spoons with his "mind" (try: with his croutons!), the "magic bullet" in the Warren Commission report (can somebody say, "strategically placed croutons"?).

It's all coming together now, coalescing, congealing, conglomerating--coagulating even--into a cohesive, coherent hole...er...whole. That's right, both. It'll be the black hole to end all black holes. "The Big Crunch" I've heard it called. But now we know why: the mighty (mitey?)crouton. The whole song, the universe, the entirety of everything scrunched down into a nut, a germinal ideal, all an nth the size of the smallest particle known to man.

The point you ask? Well, like I said before, I hesitate to use that term, given the uncertain nature of reality and the bounds of our knowledge. But insofar as there ever was such a thing--physically, psychically, or grammatically--it's this: The crouton and its exerted force form the missing pieces to my particle thesis; they complete the song, a song mightier and more majestic than can be sung by all the angels you could fit on the head of a pin. And that is about as fine a point as any one could make.



© 2005 George Czar