FRIGHTENED

Clunes, NSW, Australia

We were certain, our lives shortened, that we were driving into a brick wall. Everything that he had been, everything he had lived, disappeared to nothing in a baying crowd. They laughed because they had robbed him; and robbed him agian. "No power, falang have now power," they chanted, their ridicule dying in the fetid air, unashamed at their invasion of privacy, their stupidity, the fact that they were idiotic enough to put cameras in a foreigners bedroom, idiotic enough to ridicule someone else's sexual prowess. Unashamned at their own disrespect. That was how it came; how in his dreams that same haunted house, ringed by jeering Thais, kept recycling through his brain. Traumatised, for sure, "a difficult experience, but interesting to watch", he observed in a conversation with an elderly, dying woman who had been kind to him when he was a suicidal 15-year-old. And who, as a result of her kindness so long ago, he had always held in high esteem.

There was no one to hold in high esteem, no kindness, in the baying of the mob. And that this same baying mob kept haunting his dreams, even now, all these months and years later, was unfortunate. He knew they would leave eventually, go back to their own crummy mafia, garbage infested lives, go back to watching mind nunbing soap operas of rich Thais who never appeared to work swanning around huge houses, while most of the populace watching the "supastah" actors lived in tiny rooms, but still they came and sat and watched in endless cycling dreams. Trauma led to triumph; and of course in this case another theft by another landlord, but still he wished them gone from his life, the trauma eradicated. The breakdown resolved. Irremedially. But still they came and watched, like ancient, evil crows, and all that had ever been, all that ever was or ever would be, was captured in their baying, just out of focus faces, in the blank stares of shop keepers, the smirks and derision of people who should have shown some minimal level of courtesy.

That these idiot forces had been unleashed by the mafia, in league with corrupt police and corrupt government offices, was no secret. That the populace, any populace, was easily manipulasted into a frenzy was also no secret. But that he had been the object of their spite and ridicule, at a time of life when he had been desperately seeking an avenue of calm, that they had robbed him with glee, pillaged his assets, and bayed at the moon because he had dared to do what he had always done, write as he saw fit, was not just some surface trauma of the soul, but somewhere more intwined in everything that he had been. The perfect storm; the loss of the job, his kids, the house he had lived in for a decade with his kids, his identity, his little farm, at a time when he was leaping from one persona to another, struggling to regroup, come back, had left him lying spreadeagled across a floor, not just desolate but broken, not just embarrassed but mortified. And so he sought oblivion. And found no comfort in the empty spaces. Made poor decisions and told them to go fuck themselves. But even there the ridicule mounted, the surveillance ran out of control.

Michael drew them out on to a thin piece of ice, a dusty little town on the Indian border, Buddha's Birthplace, and even there they followed, the malicious fools. "I thought they were nice at first," one of the officers said of the Thais. "But I can see now they aren't." No, they weren't. What business of theirs was it who he chose to keep company with, or not? What business of theirs was it what he looked like in the shower? "He doesn't have a very good body," one of the Thais said, trying, perhaps, to excuse the thieving and maligning of the rent boy at the origin of his travails. "He's sixty years old, for Christ's sake," an Ausralian intelligence officer snapped back.

The heat was astounding.

Their discomfort manifest.

The waste of resources obliged by the Thai mafia and their pursuit of an individual astonishing.

But that was the way it was.

That some of these demons still lived rent free in his head was not surprising.

That they had provided him with one of the greatest opportunities he would ever have, that was where the surprise lay.

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/141a097d8ea7fab6

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs for their work that explains why subatomic particles have mass. They predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle, which was confirmed last year by experiments conducted at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

But today’s celebrations mask a growing anxiety among physicists. The discovery of the Higgs boson is an undoubted triumph, but many note that it hasn’t brought us any closer to answering some of the most troubling problems in fundamental science.

A senior physicist went so far as to tell me that he was “totally unexcited by the discovery of the Higgs boson”. Though not the typical reaction, this discovery threatens to close a chapter of 20th century physics without a hint of how to start writing the next page.

Until July last year, when physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced its discovery, the Higgs boson remained the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that describes all the particles that make up the world we live in with stunning accuracy. The Standard Model has passed every experimental test thrown at it with flying colours, and yet has some rather embarrassing holes.

According to astronomical measurements, the matter described by the Standard Model that makes up the stars, planets and ultimately us, only accounts for a tiny fraction of the universe. We appear to be a thin layer of froth, floating on top of an invisible ocean of dark matter and dark energy, about which we know almost nothing.

Worse still, according to the Standard Model, we shouldn’t exist at all. The theory predicts that, after the Big Bang, equal quantities of matter and antimatter should have obliterated each other, leaving an empty universe.

Both of these are good scientific reasons to doubt that the Standard Model is the end of the story when it comes to the laws of physics. But there is another, aesthetic principle that has led many physicists to doubt its completeness – the principle of “naturalness”.

The Standard Model is regarded as a highly “unnatural” theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist.

The Higgs’s boson provides us with one of the worst cases of unnatural fine-tuning. A surprising discovery of the 20th century was the realisation that empty space is far from empty. The vacuum is, in fact, a broiling soup of invisible “virtual” particles, constantly popping in and out of existence.

The conventional wisdom states that as the Higgs boson passes through the vacuum it interacts with this soup of virtual particles and this interaction drives its mass to an absolutely enormous value – potentially up to a hundred million billion times larger than the one measured at the LHC.

Theorists have attempted to tame the unruly Higgs mass by proposing extensions of the Standard Model. The most popular of which is “supersymmetry”, which introduces a heavier super-particle or “sparticle” for every particle in the Standard Model. These sparticles cancel out the effect of the virtual particles in the vacuum, reducing the Higgs mass to a reasonable value and eliminating the need for any unpleasant fine-tuning.

Supersymmetry has other features that have made it popular with physicists. Perhaps its best selling point is that one of these sparticles provides a neat explanation for the mysterious dark matter that makes up about a quarter of the universe.

Although discovering the Higgs boson may have been put forward as the main reason for building the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), what most physicists have really been waiting for is a sign of something new. As Higgs himself said shortly after the discovery last year, “[The Higgs boson] is not the most interesting thing that the LHC is looking for”.

So far however, the LHC has turned up nothing.