Peter, Candice, all:
Thrilled with this thread, I'd like to add:
Neutrinos
As in cyclotrons
buried beneath miles and miles
of countryside, tiny particles
of energy sometimes collide,
making a track we can see.
In similar ways, the work
of us is like that.
Gerald
----- Original Message -----
From: "Candice Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2002 2:09 PM
Subject: Re: A Responsibility to Awe
> Thank you _very_ much for posting this, Peter! Your review made me want to
> read Elson's book for its prose pieces as well as the poems, and I was
also
> very taken with Cornelia Parker's sculpture and the theatrical
anti-matters
> of the Mimescope Company (in the "related articles" on the physicsweb
site).
> The site itself is a great find for me because I've been reading up on the
> dark-matter-related matter of solar neutrinos for a poem that wants to be
a
> SNO-globe (and may just get there with some help from Randolph), and I
found
> half a dozen articles there with useful info and/or links. The
> Super-Kamiokande link then took me back to poetry with links in turn to
John
> Updike's hilarious "Neutrinos" (unintentionally so, in terms of having
been
> subsequently proved wrong re "they have no mass"!) and to Seattle
physicist
> Roberta Wilkes's more quietly amusing haiku (both pasted in below), not to
> mention Matt Groening's oddly touching as well as funny "Life in Hell"
comic
> strip on neutrinos
> (http://www.phys.washington.edu/~superk/graphics/lifehell.gif).
>
> I don't know how it seems to you, but I sense a new, more art-full spirit
> among scientists these days that seems to have emerged with a greater
sense
> of modesty, humility even, in the face of the news that we have no
> future--that the lights themselves will go out long after life has become
> extinct--which must have shocked the, er, living daylights out of those
> cosmologists like Beatrice Tinsley who have been so "tied to the idea of
> expanding forever." It's a new sense or spirit that really gives the lie
to
> the old Snowy "two cultures" (_pace_ the occasional throwback like Alan
> Sokal), and it's got to be good for both art and science, it seems to me.
>
> One of the particle theorists from whom I've been learning about
neutrinos,
> Lincoln Wolfenstein (the W in the "MSW effect") had a wonderful response
to
> the news in 1998 of non-zero-mass flavors and the corresponding need to
> adjust his own theories accordingly. He said (when asked if he'd been
upset
> by the news): "The world is what it is, not what we imagine it to be." As
a
> poet, I'd have to disagree with him there, but I was moved (and charmed!)
by
> the humility of his attitude.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Candice
>
>
>
> Neutrinos
> By John Updike
>
> Neutrinos: they are very small
> They have no charge; they have no mass;
> They do not interact at all.
> The Earth is just a silly ball
> To them, through which they simply pass
> Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
> Or photons through a sheet of glass.
> They snub the most exquisite gas,
> Ignore the most substantial wall,
> Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
> Insult the stallion in his stall,
> And, scorning barriers of class,
> Infiltrate you and me. Like tall
> And painless guillotines they fall
> Down through our heads into the grass.
> At night, they enter at Nepal
> And pierce the lover and his lass
> From underneath the bed. You call
> It wonderful; I call it crass.
>
>
>
> Haiku
> By Roberta Wilkes
>
> Ghostly neutrino
> Elusive as you may be
> Still, you pay the rent
>
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