Friday, February 17, 2023

Married To A Model

This year's Valentine's Day poem from 4 gravitons:

Married to a Model

If you ever face a physics class distracted,
Rappers and footballers twinkling on their phones,
Then like an awkward youth pastor, interject,
“You know who else is married to a Model?”

Her name is Standard, you see,
Wife of fifty years to Old Man Physics,
Known for her beauty, charm, and strangeness too.
But Old Man Physics has a wandering eye,
and dreams of Models Beyond.

Let the old man bend your ear,
you’ll hear
a litany of Problems.

He’ll never understand her, so he starts.
Some matters she holds weighty, some feather-light
with nary rhyme or reason
(which he is owed, he’s sure).

She’s unnatural, he says,
(echoing Higgins et al.),
a set of rules he can’t predict.
(But with those rules, all else is possible.)

Some regularities she holds to fast, despite room for exception,
others breaks, like an ill-lucked bathroom mirror.

And then, he says, she’ll just blow up
(when taken to extremes),
while singing nonsense in the face of Gravity.

He’s been keeping a careful eye
and noticing anomalies
(and each time, confronting them,
finds an innocent explanation,
but no matter).

And he imagines others
with yet wilder curves
and more sensitive reactions
(and nonsense, of course,
that he’s lived fifty years without).

Old man physics talks,
that’s certain.
But beyond the talk,
beyond the phases and phrases,
(conscious uncoupling, non-empirical science),
he stays by her side.

He knows Truth, 
in this world,
is worth fighting for.

1 comment:

neo said...

Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the Big Bang, suggesting the early universe may have had a stellar fast-track that produced these “monsters.”

While the new James Webb Space Telescope has spotted even older galaxies, dating to within a mere 300 million years of the beginning of the universe, it’s the size and maturity of these six apparent mega-galaxies that stun scientists. They reported their findings Wednesday.

Lead researcher Ivo Labbe of Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology and his team expected to find little baby galaxies this close to the dawn of the universe — not these whoppers.