Why my lips move

Alice Oh, Biota 2009

Lepton decay, said Mr. Quantum Mechanics. He leans toward me, eyes bright, clearly a result of lepton decay. Big, surreal words about itty-bitty things. Little things that control our universe. Leptons and quarks, anti-neutrinos. Quarks have imaginative scientist names like “up” and “down,” “top” and “bottom,” “charm” and “strange”. These invisible particles have colors, habits, flavors and doomed-to-failure relationships. Ask any quantum theorist, they’ll tell you all about it.

Peer through the microscope with me, fall into the wormhole, descend into nanosphere beyond. Alice Oh paints big about the small things that make and break us. Cells, molecules, atoms, quarks, shrinking abysmal into theoretical, only observed in a hadron collider at infinite speeds. Exploding the secrets of origin and starfire futures.

The angular momentum of particles. The expansion of the universe due to Einstein’s Cosmological Constant. Incomprehensible beauty to most of us. Strings of theories extricating out biology into pattern, charting the behavior of molecules, of DNA, of cells, of organs, of people. Electricity coursing up and down our DNA ladders. Unbroken flow, now broken here and there. Causing Alzheimer’s, cancer, my wrinkles now folding.

Hypothesize my blue-mood Mondays. Graph my lucky-break Tuesday. Equation-solve with your titillating calculitis the chartreuse-green glow of madness. Circumscribe the absolute whiteness of fear. Should I shudder as the world spins round on the backs of infinitesimal particles? That when leptons decay, my lips move? Thank god I now have an explanation for that.