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.