SNAFU SNARED, SCIENTISTS SAY

by Timothy Ferris

The world of theoretical physics, normally a placid pond of Apollonian calm, has been roiled by the recent news that scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory may have detected the snafu.

Identification of the long-sought-after particle would confirm a radical-although almost universally unread-theory that challenges the "standard model" currently accepted by most physicists. Adding insult to injury, the new theory portrays the standard model as itself a species of snafu.

"We're scratching our heads over this result, which, if confirmed, will oblige us to re-think some of our most cherished notions," said one scientist, who requested anonymity on the grounds that, as an experimental physicist, he fears being ridiculed by the theorists. (For similar reasons, all physicists identified in this article have been given one another's names.)

The origins of snafu theory go back to a legendary controversy between two titans of physics, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr-one that could ultimately prove even more important than their better-publicized debates over the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics. Broadly speaking, Einstein believed that snafus are caused, while Bohr maintained that they appear by random chance. Their intense difference of opinion lay behind an oft-repeated exchange that occurred when Bohr, playing goalie for the Copenhagen Institute of Physics soccer team, inadvertently tipped a ball into his own goal, thus scoring a point for the opposing team.

"That was a royal snafu!" Bohr cried out in frustration.

To which Einstein, who had kicked the ball that scored the goal, retorted, Hatte es keine Ursache, dann, Niels?- "Had it no cause, then, Niels?"-eliciting thigh-slapping guffaws from a crowd of players and spectators that included such future physics greats as Werner Heisenberg, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, and Prince Louis deBroglie.

There the debate languished for half a century, until the theorist and legendary polymath Gleason Fishkill--a Nobel Laureate said to be so smart that he hardly bothered himself with physics-published a revolutionary quantum theory of the snafu. Unfortunately, he published it in Nitalese, a language he had invented for his own amusement after mastering all 6,700 existing world languages. Fluency in Nitalese having remained the province of Fishkill himself and a handful of his former students, fewer researchers have consulted the original work than might otherwise have been the case.

The theory is said to postulate the existence of the snafu as one of three monopolar manifestations of a quantum field responsible for most, if not all, subatomic errors and mishaps. Most such mistakes go undetected, washed out amid trillions of other quantum interactions, but under certain conditions a snafu can be amplified to large scales. In a talk presented to the 1976 Nobel Symposium at Gustavus Adolphus College (in Nitalese, but translated into English by a graduate student), Fishkill suggested that amplified snafu interactions were responsible for three previously unexplained large-scale technological mishaps-the construction of CD "jewel boxes," the advent of sport-utility vehicles, and funding of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

If confirmed, the Brookhaven result opens a door onto the possibility that advanced particle accelerators, capable of higher energies, could produce the other two members of the theoretical snafu family-the royal snafu, and the fubar. Of these, only the snafu, the lightest and least consequential of the three, lies within the range of existing detectors.

The fubar, holy grail of snafu theorists, is thought to have flourished during the first 10-49 second of cosmic time, in the fires of the big bang. Indeed, some cosmologists theorize that it was the original, ur-particle from which all the others sprung, and that we therefore live in a fubar universe.

Reassuringly, given the potential repercussions, physicists calculate that royal snafus occur on the macroscopic scale only about once every few tens of millions of years on a planet the size of Earth-Fishkill has proposed that a royal snafu triggered the K/T extinction event, 65 million years ago, which doomed the dinosaurs and paved the way for the advent of homo sapiens-and that fubars are rarer still.

Still, some scientists express concern that creation of fubars in a high-energy accelerator of the future might possibly trigger a "macroscopic fubar." Propagating at the velocity of light, the fubar wave front could have either catastrophic or unimportant results, depending on how one reads the theory-which, of course, few can. "It might instantly destroy the world," says physicist Sheldon Glashow (not his real name). "Or, it could show up in a some strange, subtle, anomalous way-like, I don't know, an otherwise inexplicable election result.
"Either way," he added, "We're headed for a fubar future."

#

Timothy Ferris is a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley.