Baryonic
I’m writing a science fiction story at the moment that involves, amongst other things, an interaction between baryonic matter — that’s the stuff you and I are made of— and dark matter. This latter, as I’m sure you know, accounts for something like 85% of the total mass of the universe. Everything in our baryonic world, ourselves, our objects, the very planet on which we walk, all are very much the exception, not the rule, cosmically speaking.
Dark matter is tricky. It doesn’t react with anything (apart from gravity) which makes it very difficult to detect. It may not exist at all, although most physicists think it does. ‘Dark matter,’ says the infallible Wikipedia, ‘is called “dark” because it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation … in the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology, the total mass-energy content of the universe contains 5% ordinary matter and energy, 27% dark matter, and 68% of a form of energy known as dark energy. Thus, dark matter constitutes 85% of the total mass/energy, while dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the total mass-energy content. Dark matter is thought to be non-baryonic. It may be composed of some as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particles’.
That’s all very interesting, and playing around with the idea is hardly a new thing to do in science fiction — in Stephen Baxter’s muti-volume Xeelee sequence future humanity is caught-up in a galactic-scale war between the enigmatic and ultra-powerful alien civilization known as the Xeelee, made of baryonic matter like us, and their foes, dark matter entities called Photino Birds. It’s good stuff. Steve’s a friend of mine, but you shouldn’t let that fact distract you: the Xeelee books and stories contain some of his best writing.
Anyway: curious, I looked up where the word ‘baryons’ originated, and this is what I found: ‘the name “baryon” was coined by Dutch-American physicist Abraham Pais, from the Greek word for “heavy” (βαρύς, barýs).’ I don’t know if that’s an especially apposite piece of nomenclature, really, since ‘heavy’, in the sense of ‘affected by gravity’, also describes dark matter. But we take Pais’s point: we are made of this weighty, substantial stuff, baryons; dark matter whizzes through the cosmos unaffected by electromagnetism, strong or weak atomic forces, or by very much at all, actually.
But here’s the thing: although βαρύς does mean “heavy” in Greek, it more broadly means emphatic, strong, pronounced or harsh. For instance, βαρύς γλυκός means “very sweet”. And if we go back to Ancient Greek, βαρύς means: “heavy, burdensome, oppressive”, but also “deep, hollow, having a loud voice, grievous, troublesome, painful”. That’s a pretty interesting semantic field for the stuff out of which we are literally made. What are our atoms? They are burdensome stuff. They are grievous stuff. They are very stuff. It’s who we are.
