The multiverse in verse

    SEVEN QUESTIONABLE LIMERICKS

1)

A mass-less neutrino named Bill

Went so fast his friends seemed to stand still.

            He sped past each boson

            And zipped past a photon

With “I’ll go faster than light, yes I will!”

2)

A cosmic observer called Mark*

Found 1a’s were a standardized spark,

            So we know space expands

            Quicker than math demands

And we call its strange energy “dark”.

3)

Since the time of the Tories and Whigs,

Since Adam was clad just in figs,

            Laws of church and of state

            Have had no science debate,

For you can’t have a Mass without Higgs.

4)

The math that describes quantum strings

Also seems to explain cosmic things,

            But it needs ten dimensions,

            Which causes some tensions

About “Theory of Everything” flings.

5)

A hip physicist, Brian Greene,

Has us contemplate worlds yet unseen.

            Be it blessing or curse,

            This weird multi-verse

Would multiply both kind and mean.

6)

Does our spacetime grow rounder or flatter?

Do WIMPs make far light bend and scatter?

            Spirals don’t fall apart,

            So we think, as a start,

Seven tenths of our “stuff” is dark matter.

7)

The Standard Model is viewed as an article

Proved by the mass and the charge of each particle.

            Yet it would be better

            And shown to the letter

If supersymmetry found us a sparticle.

*Phillips

 Dec. 26, 2011

Walking through the Valley, a scientist discerns benevolence....

THE GOD TREE 

 Quercus lobata, California Valley Oak

 
 
The God Tree dropped its acorns
In the ancient autumn
For roving bands to gather;
Ohlone women basketed them,
Then pounded them
With sandstone mortars
And leached the tannins out
In flowing waters.
 
The God Tree’s temple
Is a low-railed sacred oval
To protect its privacy.
We stand outside,
In space that’s secular­
Reserved for California’s young
To hear the wisdom
Of poets and scientists.
 
The God Tree arches
Through both space and time.
Its years since saplinghood
Are more than our group’s
Human birthdays added each to each.
It forms a three-crowned Trinity:
Full forty feet of ordinary oak,
A hundred horizontal reach to south
With midway branches
Where it rests upon the ground,
And then another towering crown
Where that huge trunk
Turns upward once again.
 
Our priestess/guide elaborates
Upon its staunch parishioners.
A class of student teens
Once counted species
Within its thrall:
The hawk, the squirrel,
The mustard flower, the native grass,
The lichen and the lizard,
The cricket and the tiny wasp
Which creates pink micro-galls
As nurseries on the underside of leaves.
Two hundred thirteen separate species logged,
If the counters themselves were counted.
 
The God Tree carries
Both its pollen feathers
And its acorn flowers.
The wind insures a fertile source
Of future valley oaks.
The Tree’s soft, bright, photosynthesizing green
Will add another ring this year
To the living layer hid inside
It’s massive trunk.
Sugars surge inside its channels
And water finds its way
From root branches far underground
To trembling leaf tips.
All this before the deep-lobed leaves
Succumb to winter cold.
 
The God Tree
Rules benevolently
And asks no sacrifice
From us.

March 31,   2009

 

The color of memory....

 NOT KNOWING

I do not know the color of my father’s eyes.

I feel the shape of him,

His arms around me as a child.

I hold his hand

And walk the Westwood hills in spring.

I slam the ping-pong ball

Across the net.

He dives for it and cuts a spin.

I miss.  But then we stop

To catch Fred Allen’s jokes.

The radio is propped inside

The workshop window.

I see the crinkle lines of laughter

And his squinted face in mirth,

But I cannot see the color of his eyes.

He reads to us, to June and me and Mom.

The Hobbit.  As Gollum, he hisses at us.

“My Precious.”  How we giggle!

His voice is bigger than the man.

Across the campus from the mathematics wing

I can hear his lecture.

Never would I take his class!

In our den, his desk is sacred

With its scribbled pads

And proof marks in the galleys.

But June and I can swing each other in his chair.

We wind the Victrola for “The Stars and Stripes Forever” march

Until he booms at us to cut it out.

Yet I do not know the color of his eyes.

His head is tilted to the right.

He wears a cap.

I find him with a trowel and iris tubers,

On his knees.

I see him both with straight black hair

And bald.  “You can’t grow brains

And a cover crop on the same pasture,” he says.

I cannot visualize him as a boy.

I never asked about the orphanage.

He told us Doitelbaum loomed over them

And switched their hands.

I never asked if he had friends.

He brings fresh flowers in to Mom.

She sets them in a vase and kisses him.

Her eyes are dainty blue,

But his I cannot see.

We camp in the Valley for a month

With Glacier Point above our tent.

My father builds the fire

And fries the trout we caught.

The ranger, Bert, can imitate bird whistles.

His eyes are blue.

But what was the color of my father’s eyes?

When he was dying, slowly, heart inadequate,

I’d visit him and read to him

Or pat his hand and hold it.

He didn’t really comprehend

Our presence in the room.

Behind that veil,

What was the color of his eyes?

He framed the world in camera finders.

Flash powder – startling, acrid, frightening!

But then, the prints,

With tiny, captured little girls

Held on black album pages.

After he died, I sorted through a thousand

Color slides of family.

Our dresses were in red or mustard yellow

Or patterned blue.

But his eyes that saw all this,

What color were they?

His childhood was a bleak and loveless one,

Yet still he gave us so much gentle love.

So well I know and love him,

But I do not know the color of his eyes.

Nov. 18, 2003