L=H=C poem

I recently came across a bad physics joke inspired by the Large Hadron Collider: “do my bosons give you a hadron?” One of possibilities of the LHC is, as many probably know, is the possibility of finding the Higgs Boson, a particle presumed to emerge from ripping up the fabric of the universe in some new way. I’m not a physicist, as that probably horribly inaccurate definition would suggest. What’s interesting to me about the joke is that it seems representative in part of a sort of visual poetry resulting from typos, like the use of vodak among internet posters for vodka, a use that has become a joke about typing, much as do ZOMG and other silly acronyms intending to mock the accidents of high-speed typing as a new communication form. I mean there the hadron for hardon. And then there’s the simple visual joke of n for m, another typo product as well as a visual slip. All in all, this isn’t the most intellectual post I’ve ever made—I’m far too overwhelmed with critical projects and grading to say anything very bright—but what’s interesting here is the way this silly joke reveals play as an element of poesis, given the similarity of this joke’s modes of operation to those of more serious poetic efforts. And that seems to me to fit neatly with the purposes of the LHC, spinning things around and smashing them into one another until something interesting happens.