The shadows cast by the trees were long and slender pillars. I sat quietly thinking intensely. We needed to come up with an idea; dusk was approaching ominously like a cat in wait. We were like hapless birds, nature's eyes fixed keenly upon us.

The garden after dark never bothered me as a child, but suddenly it held all the fear of the world. Scale will do that. Indeed scale was what worried me the most as a child. The sheer vastness of space, so vast in fact that kilometres or even millions of kilometres were not sufficient to measure it; you needed light years. I'd look out my window at the stars. I loved them, but they irked me equally. It was said that there were as many galaxies in the known universe as grains of sand on earth and each galaxy contained millions or billions of stars. That scale just freaked me out, but so long as there was an explanation I would come to terms with it.

That's when I learned about the Big Bang Theory in a book - I'm just glad it's still called a theory, what a bunch of crap. You're telling me that every atom in the entire universe was condensed into a point of singularity that was infinitely dense. Infinitely ShmInfinitely! What a cop out of a word, how can something be infinitely dense? That's everything on earth, mars, jupiter, our galaxy, the next galaxy over and the one after that and the trillions upon trillions of galaxies in existence all crammed into a point smaller than the tip of a needle. Please.... Pull the other one.

When the big bang supposedly happened, what did the universe grow into? Some empty space? Well where did the empty space come from? So many questions and so many nonsensical answers or 'theories'. That's why I dedicated my life to science, why I spent years at MIT and Cambridge studying Astro Physics. It's why I moved to Switzerland to work at CERN and the The Large Hadron Collider. It's also why I left and sought private funding; my ideas were radical and were never respected or funded.

It took me fifteen years working alone; then one morning I had that Eureka moment. Scale. It was all about scale. If I could make everything small seem big I might just be able to find the elusive Higgs boson or the God particle as it is known, which had the potential to tie everything together.. I figured out that by using electro magnetic induction, top and bottom quark collisions and extremely cold temperatures of -273 degrees Celsius I could detect and measure the Higgs boson.

As I sat there in my 'Garden Tower', a nickname I had come up with for my particle accelerator lab, I contemplated what to do with this information, the pinnacle of scientific endeavor. It could change the world or indeed end it and the power lay in my hands.

Five Minute Free Writes

I am back doing these Free writes again, well occasionally anyway! This time I forgot to set a timer so this story went on a bit longer than usual, it's very raw and a bit all over the shop, but hopefully ye enjoy it.

Do you know about Free writes? When I first arrived on Hive or the previous chain, I would often struggle for ideas on what to write about, and there were two writing initiatives that really helped - one was called #fiftywords where you could use only fifty words to tell a story about a prompt word and the other was #freewrite which basically sets a challenge of writing a mini story within 5 minutes. I regularly took part in both, and people like @mariannewest and @felt.buzz and loads of other brilliant people, so every now and then I see a post from @mariannewest and think to myself, go and do a freewrite. I hope to continue to pop in every now and then to say hello.

Maybe you've never heard of the freewrites yourself, and if that is the case, I'd encourage you to have a go, read about todays prompt and how to enter below and above all else mind yourself and have a great day - smile, rub a dog, help a stranger and just be a nice human.

https://hive.blog/hive-161155/@mariannewest/day-1891-5-minute-freewrite-monday-prompt-garden-tower

The photo used is not my own and was sourced on https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/large-hadron-collider-restarts-after-two-years/

Peace out.