On Eve of Physics Symposium, More Sub-Atomic Particles Found
by Nick Herbert
Only a few weeks before the Esalen Seminar on the Nature of Reality, where top physicists and philosophers meet each year to decide what portion of the Great Secret to release to the public, private researchers at the Strongly Non-linear Accelerator Center (SNAC), Bonny Doon, California, announced the discovery of a handful of new particles that sent theorists back to their blackboards and experimentalists into their tunnels for ritual confirmation. The SNAC facility, the largest of its kind, produces the strongest weird-particle beam in the Solar System.The first of the new particles—christened the Sigma in honor of San Francisco theorist Saul-Paul Sirag, who predicted its non-existence—appears to be another heavy lepton, resembling in all properties (save mass) its lighter brothers Mu and Tau. Chief SNAC scientists Drs. Kenneth Goffman and Alison Kennedy are modest about their discovery. "We see weirder things on our coffee breaks," they said, insisting that the Nobel Prize be shared with their reclusive colleague Dr. Nic Harvard, who provided the drugs necessary for the fundamental breakthrough.
After months of secrecy, the SNAC group's unorthodox techniques were finally revealed in Kennedy's controversial article "Quantum Tantra," published in last month's Physical Review, the major scholarly journal of the American physics community. Kennedy's paper was immediately repudiated by established physicists for its blatant violation of normal standards of professional conduct, scientific rigor, and common decency.
Unlike the Sigma, which can be observed by anyone with a research budget the size of the National Debt, SNAC's other new particles are invisible to everyone not in the proper state of consciousness, the first of many examples of "state-specific physics" emerging from research projects initiated in the '60s and only now beginning to bear fruit. In addition to their unanticipated physical properties, the new particles seem to possess mental attributes as well. Making contact is easy, but scientific study of these psychic quanta or "Persons," as they are called at SNAC—is possible only by researchers with strong egos, since the experience is more akin to demonic possession than data collection.
"Expect to be changed a lot, when you mess around with Persons," warn researchrs Goffman and Kennedy. "Each one is unique—an utterly alien island of consciousness. They're around us all the time now, and the only thing they want to do is get inside your body."
"We can't keep them in the lab. They fly right through our thickest shields. Before we could shut SNAC down, trillions of merge-hungry Persons had already escaped through the walls. They're slithering into restaurants now, into laundromats and shopping malls, even into your own bedroom, attracted by concentrations of human emotion."
"We're terribly sorry, folks, but everyone alive is involved in this experiment now. The era of state-specific physics has arrived!"