Bumbling around the Web, you can't help but notice that pop culture references to particle physics pop up everywhere. Dark energy is not just a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe; it's an evil vibe, a video game company and a gaming weapon (typical gamer exchange: "Any 1 know what Dark Energy is for?" "you get it after last zhul raid.") Ditto the Higgs boson, as in this Wall Street Journal review of the 2012 McLaren MP4-12C sports car describing it as
...crazy light, a mere 3,279 pounds. There's a kind of sheer depravity of physics going on here, a larceny of inertial mass, as if the car had been scoured of its Higgs bosons.
(Technically, of course, things don't contain Higgs bosons; see an explanation here. But the reference made me smile.)
But long before the current particle physics craze got going there was Poppa Neutrino, aka David Pearlman, who died in January at the age of 77.
An obituary in the New York Times obituary describes him as
... an itinerant philosopher, adventurer and environmentalist ... who founded his own church, crossed the Atlantic on a raft made from scrap and invented a theoretically unstoppable football strategy.... He had no fixed abode but had spent the last two years in Burlington, Vt., building and testing a new raft on Lake Champlain that he planned to sail around the globe.
The article -- long, full of surprises, well worth a read -- describes how Pearlman chose the name Poppa Neutrino 27 years ago after recovering from a serious illness brought on by a dog bite. He felt reborn, and felt a kinship with the elusive, fast-moving, fundamental particle.
One of the legacies of this fascinating and eccentric gentleman is The Flying Neutrinos, a jazz band he founded with his wife in the 1980s; it's now led by his daughter, Ingrid Lucia, and just one of a number of physics-inflected bands and songs that add zing to pop culture.
