Swans on Tea

English Professors and other language professionals, long jealous of the attention and funding afforded the Large Hadron Collider and other “big physics” projects, have embarked on a new research initiative: that of high-energy language. The ambitious project will follow several avenues of investigation in an attempt to invigorate the field of research.

“We all know what happens when you split an infinitive,” remarked Prof. John Wurterschmidt, “but we’re only familiar with the results at pedestrian energies. Until now, nobody has investigated what happens when you do this at hundreds of MeV. Is the language relativistic? That is, we need to be finding out if words take on new meanings when they are traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And, of course, the ultimate goal of discovering if there is an inherent structure to language, beyond what we give it. We really need this. A whole lot more than yet another analysis of Wuthering Heights.”

To do so, words will be accelerated to high energy and collided, and it is believed that this will result in the creation of participles and antiparticiples along with a shower of punctuation marks, mostly commas and apostrophes, but with the occasional exclamation point and question mark or even a rare ampersand, in the case of collisions involving irregular verbs. These reactions should shed some light on the asymptotic freedom behavior of individual syllables. At high enough energies, still years away from investigation, would be the creation of the Roget boson, also known as the saurus particle, which is thought to give words their meaning.

It is hypothesized that the symmetry of words is broken at some high energy of unknown value, and above this unification point words with similar meanings and etymologies are actually one word, there is no metaphor mixing and that all sentence structure is in palindrome form. That investigation will have to wait, however, as the preliminary funding will only allow for investigations of lower-energy interactions. In the initial experiments, words will be linearly accelerated to collide with a fixed target (The Oxford English Dictionary, if the collaboration can afford it), using a finely crafted “while-u-were-out” memo as a projectile. Later on, if sufficient funding is obtained, they will be able to construct a storage-ring system where nouns can be collided with their antonyms, which will be able to achieve much higher energies and allow for more exotic interactions. If all goes well, the construction of a relativistic fat novel collider will then be proposed, which will be able to explore even more aspects of the field, such as the effects of Lorentz contraction (does a novel become a short story at sufficiently high speeds?).

Wurterschmidt downplayed potential hazards of such projects, scoffing at the notion that this kind of an undertaking might prove dangerous. Some have posited that it could create a micro-meta-anthology of particularly dense and indecipherable writing which would accumulate chapters until it could devour entire libraries. “That’s poppycock. We wouldn’t be able to create anything not already being written. Stereo instructions already exist, and that hasn’t destroyed us yet.” The main danger appears to be much more mundane, as any such device must be power by a large number of monkeys typing on keyboards, which, Wurterschmidt notes, generates almost as much filth as the campus fraternities.

“Almost.”