In Battle Against CERN

After my talk at Threadfest in Southlake, my ego was greatly inflamed from the praise and flattery I received. In some sense, I had claimed the mantle of "house scientist" among our small community. From now on, I have to live up to it. This means, I realize, that in following through I will need to be more public in persona and come out from hiding. I am currently in the midst of figuring out how to do that.

All that ego inflation is coming crashing down this week because I am turning my attention to writing up the scholarly paper based on the talk I gave in Prague this summer. This is to be peer-reviewed and to appear in the conference proceedings. The deadline has already passed but I am assured I can still sneak my paper in.

This is very humbling because my paper is to be full-on attack on the current regime of high energy physics and advanced particle theory. It is humbling for many reason, not the least of which is relearning how to use LaTeX (pronounced LAH-TEK) after many years. This the typesetting "language" that for many years has been used to markup scientific papers for submission, so that equations look nice in print. I was once an expert on LaTeX to the point of typesetting a 400-page book full of equations and diagrams. That was back in 1998. Learning LaTeX again is like learning to walk again in physical therapy. It is coming back very slowly to me.

Even more humbling is the idea that all the mouth-shooting-off I've been doing to lay folks about how CERN is perhaps a big nothingburger when it comes to the fundamental elements of the universe will come smack up against some referee who may not be friendly to me. So I write the article with this in mind. I want to say only things I can legitimately defend as truth. What do I know, compared to all those super-smart folks?

Even more humbling still is that once in print, my paper will be read by other people who may base their opinions on mine. This is the heaviest burden of all in my mind. It makes me terrified of spreading error. We have so much error lately.