Unreality

[Terri’s latest enchanting piece, “Sacred Space for Particles”, brought back to me a poem I wrote after seeing an absolutely riveting documentary – on the BBC’s often excellent science programme, “Horizon” – about the search, by Particle Physicists for the Higgs Boson particle. It’s a pretty crude poem, but encapsulates the essence of what my scientific training allowed me to understand, with a sprinkling of poetic licence]

How far can poets go, then,
down into ‘icle physics?
To discover parts of subatomic mass,
so small it is beyond minute
and, in just a second, what happens is
really unbelievable, beyond imagination.
Protons collide with protons
and create a random mess
of particles, so mini and invisible,
that they cannot find them all!
There’s one they really had to find:
and in ten years, they found top quark.
So small it was that it could not be seen
or heard or measured, but they did…
they did, the clever buggers, they did!

I can see and hear and feel him
stirring in his grave; Albert is excited
at the very thought of contemplating
the distinct possibility that space-time,
(that is the space-time he invented)
could actually be outside the universe
or is that what he meant by relativity?
Is it perhaps, therefore inside itself?
Who will win the race to tell?
We know they’ll find a smaller particle
[they say they know of one already] that’s
smaller than top quark, so small it cannot be,
it couldn’t even exist, until another brain
turned it round and called it by
a human name; Higgs-Boson is…

Well, he is like a wanted criminal
only, so romantic, all the greatest
physicists and philosophers of the world
want a piece of him, or her.
They have a huge accelerator,
deep under mountains, under ground,
where no harm can come to us.
They justify the billions by saying
that the quest is so enjoyable;
so much a part of human instinct
to enquire about the boundaries,
[if they exist at all] of our perception..
..of reality, by physics and philosophy.
The journey’s worth the cost, they say,
but all the poets, they know so much more.

They know the nature of the universe
may be measured in very ‘icle parts,
so small, so infinitesimally small,
that we suspect they are beyond
description using epithets. Oh no,
they’re under the spell of mathematics!
No earthly words suffice, not there.
Even the ancient Greeks didn’t know this;
their Alpha has been squared, and will
Omega cubed and integration, calculus
return the answer they all crave?
Or will the search for ultimate smallness,
through fuzziness, get us to the end?
Is the start to finish of a shrinking universe,
rather like a journey round the Circle line?

So we could arrive back at the point
where it all started; where we all began:
four dimensional Space-time Relativity.
The structure of the universe, a hologram?
Could we be a product of our imagination?
To recapitulate, then, we are in search
for something that is so damned small,
that we can’t see it, hear it, measure it
in any human way at all!
And yet, theoretical physicists claim
that one day soon, they will exclaim
Eureka! We have found Higgs-Boson!
But if they can’t describe it mathematically,
the beginning and the end of everything
is the poetical imagining of unreality.

– John Anstie

© 2011, poem, John Anstie, All rights reserved
Photo credit ~ LHC -CHERN Cocument Server licensed under CC A-SA 3.0 Unported License

JOHN ANSTIE (My Poetry Library and 42) ~ is a British poet and writer, a contributing editor here at Bardo, and multi-talented gentleman self-described as a “Family man, Grandfather, Occasional Musician, Amateur photographer and Film-maker, Apple-MAC user, Implementation Manager, and Engineer. John participates in d’Verse Poet’s Pub and is a player in New World Creative Union. He’s been blogging since the beginning of 2011. John is also an active member of The Poetry Society (UK).

John has been involved in the recent publication of two anthologies that are the result of online collaborations among two international groups of amateur and professional poets. One of these is The Grass Roots Poetry Group, for which he produced and edited their anthology, “Petrichor* Rising“. The other group is d’Verse Poet Pub, in which John’s poetry also appears The d’Verse Anthology: Voices of Contemporary World Poetry, produced and edited by Frank Watson.

* Petrichor – from the Greek pɛtrɨkər, the scent of rain on the dry earth.