Friday, July 06, 2012
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 called the Higgs Boson or the God particle,
the one that will explain everything,
the one we claim to have found.
Presumably it will tell us
how matter obtains mass,
but will it explain how
thought becomes thing?
Dorothy Walters
June 8, 2011
Note: The HIggs Boson or God Particle is much in the news these days, for it has apparently been spotted through CERN, the great "atom smasher" in Switzerland.
I have long been interested in quantum physics where long standing assumptions have been challenged and overturned. I wrote and published the above poem about a year ago.
The boson is apparently the tiniest component of the atom, and, as I get it, perhaps the tiniest known component of the universe. It takes us to the very edge of our scientific knowledge of how the universe is made, but, as I suggest in this poem, it does not explain how "thought becomes thing," as many Eastern philosophies suggest (Cosmic Consciousness (Brahma) precedes manifestation).
I wonder if somehow bosons are connected to kundalini, for which science as yet to provide explanations. Perhaps in rapture things go on not only at the cellular but also the sub-cellular level, and perhaps these processes are produced by bosons, the key component of the ecstatic cosmic dance. Perhaps the universe is composed of pure energy which exists as endless ecstasy, and, when we are in alignment, we too experience such overwhelming delight.
