Fall-Out from the ‘Arrow in the Sky’ in Willow’s wintry prompt for Magpie#50

Theoretical physicists believe that it should be possible to make subatomic particles travel ‘backwards’ (but not forwards) through space-time. Time-jumps of fractions of a millisecond should be possible. The energy input required would be immense.

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet

There is an easier way for particles

as overweight and slow as you or I

to turn the trick. Go West, young man! How fast?

Bit faster than the Earth rotates around

its axis. The clocks will say you’ve reached your goal

before you started out. But you’ll be jetlagged,

sandbagged’s how you’ll feel. Is there an upside?

Sure!  Begin your trip just after sunrise.

Then, every time you stop, face East and wait!

You’ll see Old Sol jump-start your day again.

And if you’re smart and fast enough you might

squeeze umpteen sun-ups into twenty four

short hours. But the folk just waking up

will scarce have time to see you whizzing by.

Hard work on the Equator. Further North –

Or South, from Oslo, say, or Santiago

you’d only need to saunter round the globe.

P.S. This works for sunsets too. Head East!

Magpie#48

This fragment of a musical score is Willow's prompt for Magpie Tales this week.

Affliction

"Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf."

They heard the windswept tremolos in awe,

their ebb and flo, as waves crash on the strand,

an undertow to anger, loss, to pain, 

his jagged figures challenging despair.

"Speak louder, shout, for I am. Deaf."

They asked “What does your new sonata mean?”

Can you imagine the withering look this brought?

How he might snort and shake his untidy locks?

“Go to your Shakespeare! Read ‘Tempest’” he scoffed.

"Speak louder, shout, for I. Am. Deaf."

‘Tempest’ The nickname stuck!  At least it’s more

appropriate than “Moonlight”  No moonbeams

light the rage of that finale, never mind

triplets that lap the shore of Lake Lucerne.

Go to “The Tempest”, then. So. Does he mean

his new work is 'rough magic'? Or perhaps

the lilting rondo is Miranda’s dance

at her wedding to noble Ferdinand?

For sure in the wintry gales we hear

a ship grind on the reef, splinter in shards

and sink to the deeps on bass arpeggios

I prefer “Our revels now are ended.”

Here he admits the best of life is over.

From now on all that seems sublime, heroic,

wild, will play out only in his unkempt head,

where still he hears what his ear no longer can,

with courage that proves the artist and the man.

"Speak louder. Shout, for I am DEAF."

Beethoven composed the D minor piano sonata, Op.31 No.2 (sometimes referred to as “The Tempest Sonata”) in 1801/02 at the age of 32, the same year that he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament in which he admits his almost total deafness.  

Microfiction Monday. January 10th.

Stony River allows 140 characters to base a story, etc., on this picture prompt of the "Mothman" statue in West Virginia, commemorating the strange "Mothman" urban myth/legend.  I have tried to squeeze a poem into (or do I mean out of?) the alloted characters.

Heart armoured, hidden your face,

defence to love’s embrace?

I’m your old flame drawn to her Moth.

Dear One, I beg you. Let’s renew our troth.

(140 chars. inc spaces)

Magpie#47

“My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”  J.B.S Haldane, British geneticist and evolutionary biologist (1892 – 1964)

Questions of Scale.

Mr.Wills taught physics the way ducks take

to water.  He’d bring some odd-ball sculpture in . . .

just leave it on his desk. He knew we’d giggle,

but soon someone would say “Sir? Sir . . what’s that?”

“It’s the Universe,” he said, “but also

the inside of the atoms you are made of.”

(He knew exactly how to wind us in.)

“Our brains evolved to manage ‘middle-sized.’

We cope with ‘six feet tall’ and ‘thirteen stone’

‘Give me ten minutes!’, ‘Forty thou a year.’

But galaxies? The quark?  They’re foreign lands.

measured in numbers we manipulate,

I’ll grant, manipulate, but have no handle on.

What’s a light-year  as you walk to school?

A metre to electrons?  Infinite!

Look,” he said, “the atom and the galaxies -

both full of empty space that’s given form

In the vast, the very small, as in this art

by . .  these bits of curved wood.”  He tapped the thing –

We looked, and poked,, and passed the object round –

and waited.

                      “Physics models what we think

we see. These wooden ribs connect the nodes

as gravity connects and holds the stars.

But it’s a notion, a concept of our minds.

We measure, and we find the numbers answer.

So with the ribs of force inside the atom,

unseen, unfelt and yet your GPS

your mobiles, televisions, work because

our models of these unseens come out right.

Tomorrow we will talk about Black Swans.”

Who’d call in sick tomorrow after that?

Black Swans meant something cool was in the wind.

That night  I watched the panoply of stars

and marvelled how imaginary ribs

held them in their courses, and the moon

risen in loneliness beyond the roofs

but held in that same thrall.  The gravity

my teacher’s mind had modeled from a sculpt

as Newton’s had, long past, from falling fruit,

how physics is at best a metaphor . . .

And wondered what his Black Swan had in store.


More Magpie#47 entries here. Thanks to Willow for the picture prompt.