Wednesday, June 08, 2011
"Bose" (poem by Dorothy)
Bosons
Satyendra Nath Bose, born l894
in British Calcutta,
was an ordinary looking man.
He could have been
a shopkeeper
dispensing sweets,
or worked for the railroads
as a clerk or under engineer,
the way his father did.
Even his eyes do not
yield his secret,
his hidden seeing.
Without a Ph. D.,
he entered
the world of science
and came up
with conclusions
startling for their novelty.
At first his ideas
were derided,
his notions of skewed statistics
seen as absurd
(everyone knows that if you
flip a coin, one side
is bound to come up
exactly fifty percent of the time,
not two-thirds as he claimed
for the subatomic realm).
Predictably,
the journals turned him down,
and not until Einstein lent his name
to the discovery
did he see print for
his mind boggling notion
(later further verified
through Heisenberg’s
uncertainly principle.)
His approach was later
known by both their names,
Bose-Einstein statistics.
In physics, he is remembered
as the namesake of “bosons,”
indescribably minute subatomic particles
which exist at the quantum level
and are hard to pin down.
Many made reputations for
research based
on his findings,
but he never was given
the Nobel Prize,
though his now is ranked
among the most
significant scientific contributions
of our time.
The most famous boson
is the God particle,
the one that will explain everything,
the one we are still looking for.
Dorothy Walters
June 8, 2011
Note: I was inspired to write this poem this morning as I perused the galleries of artist Jeff Richards at http://www.hexagonart.com One of these is on bosons,and that led me to research this somewhat esoteric subject as it operates in quantum physics. Jeff is a most unusual artist, with a distinctive style of presentation like no on else I have seen. He is interested in all the exciting realms of current (and earlier) thought, such as Swedenborg, morphogenetic fields, angels, and quantum physics. It is refreshing to discover an artist so in tune with significant spiritual and metaphysical topics. By all means look him up!
