“This is terrible,” I muttered over breakfast. “I haven’t posted anything on the blog in two weeks. All of my posts are supposed to have something to do with particle physics, but I must say that the particle physics I have done in the past two weeks has been either been politics that I wouldn’t want to dump on my readers, or totally boring. Or both. My post about trying to keep track of datasets was boring enough.”
My wife peered over the edge of the section with the comics. “Your statement is predicated on the idea that you actually have readers,” she said. “Have you been reading Dilbert this week? He built a particle accelerator. You could write about that.”
True enough — take a look over here. (Scott Adams owes me for directing millions of readers to his site.) Dilbert has built a particle accelerator in his basement, and has used it to create an antimatter Dilbert. The comic strip isn’t totally off base; Dilbert realizes that if his antimatter partner comes into contact with matter, he will disappear in a puff of energy. How anti-Dilbert solves the problem isn’t so scientific, but, hey, it’s the comics. (Suffice it to say that anti-Dilbert doesn’t survive the week at the office, and not just because of the pointy-haired boss.)
Richard Feynman, one of the iconic physicists of the second half of the 20th century, had an interesting anecdote about the idea of meeting an intelligent alien made out of antimatter; you can read a version of it here. We expect to be creating quite a lot of antimatter at the LHC…but an anti-Dilbert would be unexpected. But boy, if we could make an anti-pointy haired boss to annihilate with certain university administrators….
Tags: antimatter, comics
