"Paul Di Filippo - Our Feynman Who Art in Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

“Precisely. Although your crude summary of the subject of our faith
hardly does it justice. The Standard Model is, more elegantly put, mankind’s
best apprehension and summation and understanding of how creation
works. Can you conceive of a better text for governing one’s life, or a more
fit object of worship?”

“I don’t make judgments about anyone’s beliefs, Nick. Why don’t you
just continue to explain things to me, as you’d like our readers to hear?”

“Very well. I’ll give you a tour of our various halls of worship.”

We set off across the reception room, heading toward an arched exit.
When I stepped through the arch, I felt twisted through a dozen different
dimensions. Suddenly I found myself in a dimly lit room not previously
visible through the opening.

Tightly bunched trios of people, all in white robes adorned with
various Greek and Roman letters, interspersed the room.

“All of our postulants begin as quarks,” explained Nick. “The most
primal particles. Strange, charm, up, down, top, bottom. They seek to
shape their mentalities so as to empathetically grok this lowest level of
creation.”

“Why are they all knotted up in threes?”

“Because that’s how real quarks aggregate, in unbreakable sets of
three.”
 Peering through the dimness, I realized that each knot of three
concealed a fourth person in the middle. I inquired about the identity of
these hidden souls.

“Oh, those are W and Z bosons. They mediate the weak force that
holds the quarks together.”

It all looked and sounded rather kinky to me, and I suspected that
perhaps the Majoranists were another sex cult like so many before them.

But if these were orgiasts, they were stolid and dispassionate,
standing motionless with no groping. I felt very confused.

Leaving the bland groups behind, we made another shocking
transition, and this time I found myself in a large, bright, airy hall. The hall
was filled with a tremendous number of people, most of them zipping to
and fro.

“We call this room the ‘Cloud Chamber.’ After graduating from quark
status,” explained Nick, “our postulants become fermions and bosons of
various sorts, depending on their innate qualities. Electrons, muons,