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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