It looks like scientists in Europe have finally gotten a look at the 'God' particle and I guess that's good news, but I wish some of them would come to my house and study a phenomenon that has tormented me for years: the daily buildup of Satan particles.
Unlike the elusive Higgs boson, Satan particles are plentiful. They appear every day on bathroom floors, kitchen counters and most other flat surfaces in my house.
Physics experts say Higgs boson is the key to understanding mass, which combines with gravity to give an object weight. Satan particles display similar properties -- they combine with other tiny bits of matter like scraps of paper and dog hair to produce fluffy balls of flotsam that, if left undetected, can grow to massive proportions underneath beds and behind the refrigerator.
There's no need for a $10-billion Large Hadron Collider to pursue this inquiry. My home is a controlled energy field, and the energy comes from me as I run the vacuum cleaner day after day. Regardless of how much energy is expended in the cleaning process, Satan particles reappear within 24 hours.
Where they come from is one of the great unsolved mysteries of my personal universe. Do they enter from the outside, carried on air currents that waft in each time I open a door? Are they exuded from the house itself, as part of the gradual degradation of wood and other construction materials?
What I've never been able to do is isolate an individual Satan particle when it lands. I've come close twice, but in one case the object in question turned out to be a fragment of a peppercorn and the other was a whisker from my electric shaver that somehow made its way into the front hall.
Sometimes when late afternoon sunlight illuminates the living room I can see a vast array of non-subatomic specs floating lazily in all directions. They're suspended in the air that I'm breathing, which means there are probably numerous Satan particles permanently embedded in my lungs.
I wonder if this makes me a good candidate for donating my body to science?