On Bosons. And Name-dropping

“Now, did I read that somewhere, my dear fellow, or did I think it?”*

There are two basic types of fundamental particles: fermions and bosons. Put simply, the fermions (such as electrons and quarks) provide the stuff from which existence is built, and the bosons (such as photons and gluons; say it out loud: ‘glue-on’) mediate the various forces that bind this stuff together, like the electromagnetic, or the strong nuclear force.

Let’s think about these wondrous bosons for a moment. You could call them force-carriers, but you have to consider that they do not propagate force like, say, water molecules do an ocean wave: the fundamental forces need no medium to travel through. Bosons are in effect both medium and force; light, the electromagnetic force, travels by way of . . . particles of light, and can consequently traverse a vacuum.

At the fundamental level, there are also hadrons – as in the Large Hadron Collider – like protons and neutrons. Hadrons are in fact composite particles comprising both fermions and bosons.

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In feeling out any possible quantum metaphor for human being, I played with the idea of a human being as a hadron, made up of multiple fermions (their physical self) and a boson (their person). I was excited by the potential of this perspective, as it posited the person as that which mediates the human force!

But what was the human force? I envisioned it as the throb of replication, the intersection of history and evolution, where DNA and language, and music, and story, and knowledge and experience, all resonate to generate the buzz of humanity. I envisioned the human force as that which binds us, transcends us, and yet actually exists only within each lonely one of us.

Could I write about an idea like this without lapsing into dry dissertation and muddled logorrhea? What form could I find to satisfy the maxim of showing, not telling?

For a variety of reasons, including but not limited to my obsession at the time with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle cycle, and its search for the sublime in the mundane, I settled on memoir as the way forward. I would show myself a mediator of the human force; a person, entangled in the human field. I would demonstrate that I am of my place and time, just as my place and time are of me. I would state my quantum metaphor for human being by sketching the narrative fallacy of its emanation from the fecund undergrowth of my largely unremarkable, if mostly pleasant and privileged, little life.

There were a few potential problems. Such as the fact that I had no appetite for the “self-flagellation of auto-fiction”, which I rationalised away by deciding that a memoir didn’t have to be intimate to be personal – that I could be authentic without describing the boils on my arse. And I searched the world of letters for examples of how others might have done something similar.

Rachel Cusk convinced me that my quest could be sardonic and playful, despite the weight of its ambition. By way of (The Education of) Henry Adams, I confirmed that it was possible to write honestly and openly while keeping much private, and Annie Ernaux taught me the power of leaving things out – that one did not need to be verbose to say a lot.

Another potential problem with memoir as my chosen vehicle was that I had always been a sloppy scholar. As I never took notes on life, or much else, like Jean-Baptiste Clarence (referred to above), I rarely knew the provenance of my thinking, or was aware of it only vaguely, and maintained a healthy distrust of my episodic memory.

How then to render the human field, and depict some of the ways it worked through me, and I through it? If I could not trace the cause and effect of my thinking and doing, how would I draw the world-at-large manifesting itself in my behaviour? Or represent that behaviour, in turn, as the continuous drip of my two cents’ worth into the maelstrom of the force?

I considered leaving cause and effect largely up to the reader – the novel as parlour game – and portraying my often bumbling way through life against a sometimes roughly, even gruffly, sketched cultural and historical backdrop. In that way, I could focus the text on a personal, human story, while at least acknowledging some of those whose ideas I had stolen and abused along the way, those who had inspired me, or coloured my thinking somehow, though I may not be able to explain in what way. I could suggestively list events and happenings, public and personal, that may have influenced my existence, but spare myself, and you, dear reader, prolix exegeses of exactly how. Who could put up with all that theorising anyway?

I wondered if this approach allowed me to kill two birds with one stone. At the risk of inviting accusations of name-dropping to demonstrate my exquisite attunement with the zeitgeist, illustrate my impeccable taste and establish my intellectual chops, I could cherry-pick my personal cultural consumption over the years, inventing an apparently coherent path through my life towards ‘A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being’, while simultaneously communicating the action of the human force on my specific person, by, for instance, detailing the evolution of my reading habits along the way.

Finally, in a nod to my possibly less than pure motivation for writing at all, and the hint of hubris to it, the idea of a person as a boson offered the comfort of a possible existence beyond the physical constraints of the individual human being. Most bosons – photons excepted – are very short-lived; they decay quickly (in the order of trillionths of a second) when free-ranging.

Unless they entangle themselves sufficiently in the human field, most persons decay quickly too, when untethered from their physical being. But not all: some live on well beyond the grave and, theoretically, as long as the field persists, so can the person.

Though all is not as it may seem. More on that in the next instalment.

A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being by Ciarán Ó Néill is available to preorder now

*Jean-Baptiste Clarence, The Fall by Albert Camus