Bikes and Bosons

Yesterday, I went for a short bike ride with B.  Riding with either of my sons invariably means having a conversation.  Something about pedaling seems to get their brains and mouths running.  I usually wait for them to start the banter - just to see what topic is on their mind.  The discussion is typically one-sided, with me providing mostly grunts now and then to show I'm listening.  Yesterday, B wanted to talk about Higgs bosons (doesn't everyone?).  He'd overheard me telling N about the Large Hadron Collider a couple of weeks ago.  At the time, B was in another room doing homework.  Apparently, he'd been listening in, picking up bits and pieces of information.  Now, he wanted some blanks filled in.  I tried my best to repeat what I'd discussed with Noah.  Most of it B already knew or assumed, he just wanted confirmation from me.  Soon he was theorizing about bosons and black holes and white holes and worm holes.  I was riding ahead of him and if I happened to get too far away, he would just start shouting without missing a beat.  I hope the neighborhood enjoyed the physics lecture.

I love listening to B theorize about things like this.  To him, the possibilities are endless.  If it's theoretically possible then it could happen.  And if it could happen, well, how cool would that be?  What if we could open a wormhole between here and Mars and fly there as easily as going to the moon?  Or what if we could go way back in time (his example was 1996)?  Cool.  I hope he's able to retain this outlook as he gets older - I know so much of reality will be there saying "it can't be done".  But throughout history that's been said about a lot of things that we now can do.  It just takes people who are not willing to accept our current limitations as the best we can be.