God 'particle' discovered at CERN

Scientists at CERN announced today that they had found the Higgs-Boson particle, otherwise known as the 'God particle'. The discovery heralds a major breakthrough in particle physics. It proves another part of the Standard Model to be correct and lays bare, forever, another of the universes deepest secrets. Yet when they found it, the Higgs-Boson was not quite what they had been expecting.

'We were looking for a scatter pattern of subatomic matter that would prove the presence of the Higgs-Boson, we didn't expect to detect the actually particle itself since we had believed that would be impossible.' Said Dorky Pimplekopf, one of the team leaders at CERN. 'So none of us could quite believe it when we saw, or rather heard, the Higgs-Boson itself. It was a very small voice saying '-ness'. It turns out that we were looking for the wrong type of 'particle' all along. What actually underlies and gives weight to all matter is a very small, a subatomic, grammatical particle of the English language: '-ness'.'

When asked what the voice, presumably that of God's written into the very being of the universe, sounded like Dorky answered, 'It's hard to explain. You must understand that our microphones are incredibly sensitive and it is a sound quieter that anything any man, or creature, could ever hear. It was not a man's voice, or a woman's, or a child's. The only thing it reminded me of was when I was a boy and was playing one day at trying to reverse the Schrondinger equation. I had found a small black box and had rammed it down my pet cat's throat, in the hope the box would come out yellow. The sound the cat made as it died was reminiscent of the voice of God I heard today.'

For centuries' the scientific explanation of the world has been moving further away from normal language into the realm of pure mathematics. Now they found themselves confronted with a word, or a piece of a word. The irony has not been lost on linguists around the world. The world Dictionary Editors Union released a statement saying they were not surprised these arrogant scientific bastards had wasted billions of pounds to discover something they had known for years, 'that the answers to life's great problems lie in language and not at the bottom of a Swiss pit.'

Early speculation as to what the discovery means have been rife. With the scientists baffled by a finding that does not compute, interpretation has been sought from linguists. They suggest that it makes a lot of sense that the particle '-ness' would give ultimate mass to all existence. After all, when it is affixed to a word it gives you the essence of that word. The essence of good is goodness and by extension the essence of table might be seen as 'tableness' and life as 'lifeness'.

The linguists have suggested that the next step to understanding the universe, now the God particle has been found, is to work out what the 'God inflection' is. Then we could finally solve the problem of time and relativity by working out whether the universe exists in the past, present, future or, as many suspect, some awful sort of past-continuous.