Category Archives: Physics

Hope

Hope neither lends itself to reason

Nor the strictures of the finite

It has little shape but great substance

Which, paradoxically, laughs at Newton’s Laws

 

Instead, the well it draws from is unfathomably deep

Like quantum particles it can be in more than one place at a time

And, as with dark matter, defies observation and containment

It is, and always will be, ephemeral

 

None-the-less, all humanity relies upon it daily

Especially so, in times such as these

 

 

The Struggle to Understand

To raise and flatten mountains

To fill and dry up seas

To choose when each leaf lifts

On a softly stirring breeze

 

To mark the fleeting eons

Yet dictate a cell’s decay

To hold the world in orbit

Spinning to pass the day

 

Power wrought by nature

No conscience or regrets

Entropy increases

Obeying laws it sets

 

Is this universal

Across worlds we cannot see?

Begs another question

How can all this be?

It Could be Worse

Despite the fuss on the national news

Last week’s earthquake brought hardly a bruise

Barely enough to make walls shake

But ‘quakes elsewhere, leave deaths in their wake

 

Classed as ‘light’; Richter 4.4

Even more slight than in ’84

When we swept up the kids and ran outside

If the earth moves, there’s nowhere to hide

 

Now, it seems, we’ve another ‘grave’ threat

The ‘beast from the east’, a new cause to fret

A Siberian blast, bringing snow and ice

At -5C, the Beeb says it won’t be nice

 

But some can recall the freeze of ’82

When staying outdoors wasn’t good for you

At -26C, that really was cold

It killed by degrees, especially the old.

A Very Brief History Of The Cosmos

Out of nowhere a BANG takes place

Energy and matter now exist in space

Positive, negative, normal and dark

Atoms and strange particles, including the quark

 

Time is born; and its arithmetic

The cosmic clock makes its very first tick

Entropy increases, with empirical truth

Universe expanding, throughout its youth

 

Attractive forces come into play

Gravity, one such, holding sway

In gaseous clusters, suns start to glow

Forming heavier atoms in their fiery throe

 

Worlds coalesce from cosmic dusts

Atmospheres, weather, primordial crusts

Eons passing in galaxies rife

Goldilocks zones, permitting life

 

Normal matter, of which we’re made

Dark stuff, more common, cannot be weighed

Its job, invisible, to hold things in place

As we hurtle through the cosmos at a frantic pace