Hunting the funding

Joe Bennett (Snarks, quarks and Mr Smith, April 14) is bang on the money re physicists and snark hunting: namely, the quest to isolate an ever-elusive universal elemental building block is a classic case of chasing your own tail. Sorry, chasing your own Boojum.

Sticking with the Lewis Carroll connection, there’s an enlightening tome called The Looking Glass Universe. The excellent gist of it is that if lab coats construct all manner of fantastical machines to collide, mash or pound wee bits in order to reveal an ultimate subatomic ‘‘God’’ particle, all they will ever discover is what happens when that particular particle is bombarded by those particular machines.

In other words, the result will only ever be a looking-glass reflection of their own experiment.

Many physicists seem to genuinely struggle with the concept of true infinity. Fine as a theoretical concept, but in reality they always seem to be looking for beginnings and endings, firsts and lasts, that are literally nonsensical propositions in a truly infinite cosmos. No wonder it took Lewis Carroll and Joe to say it so well.

No matter how impressive their collider, and no matter how snarkily they pound muons into micro-matter, there’ll always, always, be one more quark to cross.

Frank Greenall, Whanganui