As I struggle to get comfortable in front of a desktop while mourning the loss of my laptop to the Geek Squad, I am pondering the interview with a young female theoretical physicist at Harvard I just read. It appears she is on the brink of actually discovering the extra dimensions that have been theorized for years now, which in my mind is pretty cool, and pretty ironic, that science has come to this:

Experimentalists will look for what are called Kaluza-Klein particles, which are associated with the hidden dimensions. The Large Hadron Collider [a particle accelerator on the French-Swiss borher that will switch on in 2007] could have enough energy to produce these particles. In our theory, Kaluza-Klein particles will decay in the detector – you find the decayed product and you can reconstruct what was there. That would provide very strong evidence of extra dimensions.

I personally believe that resurrecting the decayed product will lead the experimentalists to the discovery of a hologram-like image of a shaman in lotus position emerging from his peyote-induced meditative state long enough to open one eye as if to say “I told you so.”

But every culture has to find answers on its own terms, doesn’t it.