“Brave New World”

A Brave New World that has such ‘particles’ in it. As Miranda in The Tempest looks at the people that enter the island she lives on, she is perplexed by the newness that they bring to her little, self-contained world. The physicists at CERN seem to look at every new particle they discover with the same awe and wonder. In Miranda’s case, the people she remarks upon as new are equally astonished by her and think her to be the news. Both sides are not aware that they actually come from the same area, the same background even and are way more similar than they think possible. I do not want to create a similarity between particle physicists and new particles, but part of the message of The Tempest is about discovery of something that one already knows almost inherently and that does strike me as a similarity to the research at CERN. Physicists there discover ‘new’ particles and have new insights into a universe that subsequently seems to be very alien to the world we inhabit but still is the same.