It’s already been certified acceptable by the NY Times to give your son an Uglydoll (Great article, by the way. It quotes Gary Cross, a professor of modern history at Penn State as saying: “Boys need figures to play with. You see that going back to the Egyptians.” So fellas, if you need to get a $300 Bertie by your girl, make sure you remind her that it’s an innate need dating back to the pyramids. You’re welcome. Anyway…)
So now that it’s officially OK to give a boy a doll, Pandora’s (Plushie) Box is wide open to possibilities. For instance, can you give a physicist a doll? You bet! At least if said stuffed animal is a member of The Particle Zoo, a project conceptualized, designed and sewn by one Julie Peasley.
I’m not sure you can get more delightfully geeked out than this. Here’s an excerpt discussing the heft of the dolls:
Particle weights vary according to their properties. The Higgs boson, top quark and W boson, for example, are the heaviest–they’re stuffed with polished gravel. The massless bosons are the lightest—they are stuffed with polyfill. The muon, a middleweight (very loosely speaking), is stuffed with poly beads. I tried to make the tachyon completely massless but I’m still waiting for him to return from the past (future?) to find out if it worked.
The Particle Zoo is available as 22 individual particles and 11antiparticles with stories for $9.75 each (+ shipping). If you need to get a bunch (or, alternatively have no idea what any of this stuff means), opt for a pack: You can get the entire set of 33 for $313 or 6-packs for $55.50. The newest members of the crew are the “anatomically redesigned” Proton and Neutron. Even if you only know of CERN from The DaVinci Code, check out The Particle Zoo.
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