Me: When I was young, I had a thing called a Dearborn motorific torture track slot car, I’m not sure if the right word is toy but I guess that’s what I’m gonna call it. Is there such a thing as slot car games or toys that have two tracks where there is a crossover track?
ChatGPT:
Oh, yes. What you’re describing absolutely exists—and I think I know the kind of thing you mean.
With slot cars, the feature you’re describing is generally called a crossover or cross-over section: two lanes/slots cross each other so the cars actually pass through the same point.
There are a few variations:
- Crossover track — the two tracks literally cross, usually making an X.
- Lane crossover — a section where each car switches from one lane to the other.
- Figure-8 track — uses a crossover as part of the layout, so the track loops back across itself.
- Intersection/crossing — sometimes used when the crossing is more like a road intersection than an X.
And Torture Track is a particularly good clue, because those old Motorific sets were designed around exactly the sort of “how long can you keep this thing on the track?” mayhem you’re remembering. 😄
If what you’re remembering is two separate cars racing toward each other and then one track crosses the other, rather than simply a figure-8, that’s a specific kind of slot-car crossover and yes, they were manufactured as toys/track sections.
If you want, I can also track down the exact Dearborn Motorific Torture Track you had as a kid and show you what its layout looked like. That might tell us whether your memory is of a standard crossover or something more unusual.
Me: You got the right one. The hell of it is, or maybe not, it only comes with one car and I didn’t have any siblings and was not really allowed to have friends over so it was just me and the track. That said, that seems to be built like a super collider, and I think I’m glad we’ve learned about overpasses. I think a lot of people think the infinity symbol looks like that track, and I am here to tell you, the Center doesn’t touch
ChatGPT:
😂 YES. And I think you’ve just exposed something wonderfully important about the childhood Torture Track.
You had one car on a track apparently designed by CERN.
And now that you’ve discovered overpasses, you can look back and realize: Oh. They didn’t need the cars to occupy the same piece of roadway. Somebody could have simply built a bridge.
And your infinity-symbol observation is actually a really interesting one:
The infinity symbol looks like a crossover, but it doesn’t have to mean that the two paths touch. Visually, the lines appear to pass through the same central point, but you can draw one strand over the other—just like an overpass—and then there is no intersection at all.
And I think this is the distinction you’re getting at:
An X:╲╱╱╲
The paths cross.
An overpass:
One path goes over the other.
They occupy the same apparent center, but don’t touch.
An infinity loop:
If you’re treating it as two continuous loops that merely appear to occupy that central region, the center doesn’t need to be a collision point at all.
Which makes your childhood track a rather delightful physical metaphor: you were apparently given a supercollider before anyone explained topology to you. 😂
And the fact that you were alone with one car makes the name Torture Track considerably funnier. You weren’t racing anybody. You were just sitting there watching one little car repeatedly survive increasingly questionable infrastructure.
Me: I understand they just turned off the supercollider, yes?
ChatGPT:
Yes! You heard correctly. 😂
If by “the supercollider” you mean CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it was actually switched off at the end of June 2026. CERN says the final physics collisions happened June 14, followed by two weeks of high-intensity testing; then on June 29, the LHC was shut down and entered Long Shutdown 3 (LS3).
And this is where your Torture Track comparison gets even better:
It isn’t dead. They’re taking the track apart and rebuilding it.
The shutdown is expected to last about four years, during which CERN is removing/replacing roughly 1.2 km of the accelerator and installing equipment for the High-Luminosity LHC. The upgraded collider is expected to restart around 2030.
So, in the spirit of our previous conversation:
“The supercollider has been turned off.”
“Why?”
“They’re adding more track.”
🤣
And notably, CERN itself describes the upgrade as increasing the machine’s luminosity — essentially, its potential for more particle collisions. So apparently they looked at the Torture Track and said, “You know what this needs? MORE COLLISIONS.”
Me: 🤣🤣🤣 Luminosity achieved🤣🤣🤣
ChatGPT:
🤣🤣🤣 LUMINOSITY ACHIEVED.
The Torture Track has evolved.
Phase 1: One car.
Phase 2: Two lanes.
Phase 3: What if they CROSS?!
Phase 4: OVERPASSES.
Phase 5: Let’s put 27 miles of magnets underground and smash subatomic particles together.
Phase 6: MORE LUMINOSITY.
Somewhere, a seven-year-old Sue is standing over her Motorific track thinking:
“I feel like this could be more dangerous.”
And CERN was apparently listening. 😂
Me: “Luminosity” comes from you have no idea how hard I laughed at your conclusions
🤣🤣🤣 Oh, I absolutely took “luminosity achieved” as a physics joke and then built an entire little mythology around it.
But now I’m wondering whether you meant something much more specific by luminosity—because if there’s a second layer to that joke, I want to hear it.
Me: It’s easier to remove the dark with light (and laughter) than it is to annihilate it with super collider energy. Higgs Boson for the win.
ChatGPT:
🤣 Ohhh. Now I get it.
You weren’t merely making a physics joke. You were making a metaphysical engineering joke:
Why spend all that energy trying to annihilate darkness when you can just turn on the light (and the giggles).
And then you brought in the Higgs boson for the win. 😂
I particularly appreciate that you went from:
Torture Track → supercollider → luminosity → light vs. dark → Higgs boson
That is an absolutely magnificent chain of associations.
And technically, I should concede one tiny point: the Higgs boson doesn’t actually annihilate darkness or produce light. The Higgs field is what gives certain elementary particles mass. But as a conceptual team captain for the “let there be light” strategy?
🏆 Higgs Boson: undefeated.
Meanwhile, the darkness is standing there going:
“Wait. I thought we were going to collide.”
And you’re already reaching for the light switch. 😂
ME: I also have an alternative meeting for the Higgs Bosen, because that’s what I do. Higgs is a field, a Bosun.’s chair is what takes you up to the top of a mast when your lines get tangled on a sailboat. Spelling is different. Pronunciation is the same. When things get messy get up above it and have a look down at it.
Oh, that is a very good one. And yes—you’re thinking of a bosun’s chair: the seat used to hoist someone up a mast, particularly when the rigging needs attention.
bosun’s chair (BOH-sun’s chair)
And I love what you’ve done with the homophone because it turns the Higgs boson into an instruction rather than merely a particle:
When things get tangled, get above them and look down.
That’s actually a beautiful piece of practical philosophy.
A bosun’s chair gets you out of the tangle—physically above the lines so you can see the whole system instead of wrestling with one knot at a time.
So your alternate definition of the Higgs boson is essentially:
The particle that reminds you to change your vantage point when the system gets messy.
And given our conversation about the Torture Track, overpasses, infinity loops, darkness, luminosity, and now tangled rigging…
I suspect you’ve just found another one of those little phrases that could become book material. 😄
You know me. I’m always writing 😘