Before TASP, there was: TAPP

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

(dinsdag 13 december 2005)

Welcome to the first edition of Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry. It might very well be the last edition as well, so you’d better enjoy this one.

Neutrinos they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed – you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

By John Updike. Via Cosmic Variance. I used to only know the first three lines, had no idea it was this long.

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry, Part Two

(dinsdag 20 december 2005)

Maybe it’s not as great as Cosmic Gall, but still, here it is: the next physics poem. This one is by Erich Hückel, and speaks about Erwin Schrödinger and his wavefunction (called psi).

The original is in German:

Erwin kann mit seinem Psi
kalkulieren wie noch nie.
Doch wird jeder gleich einsehn:
Psi lässt sich nicht recht verstehn

There is an English translation, that does not run as smoothly, but may be easier to understand for some. :-)

Erwin with his psi can do
calculations quite a few.
But one thing has not been seen:
Just what does psi really mean?

(Actually, I would prefer ‘actually’ instead of ‘really’ in the last line.)

(source)

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry, Part Three

(dinsdag 27 december 2005)

A very special edition this week, because of the almost-white Christmas we had here (it started snowing yesterday): two Dutch poems by Drs. P about two big names in the construction of the modern atomic model: Rutherford and Bohr.

Rutherford

Groot natuurkundige:
Lord Ernest Rutherford
Kreeg de Nobelprijs
In negentien acht

Daar hij ten aanzien van
Submicroscopische
Deeltjes
Veel interessants had bedacht

Bohr

Niels Bohr
Kwam nucleaire wetenswaardigheden op het spoor
En als enthousiast en openhartig type
Publiceerde hij zijn correspondentieprincipe

(Uit Wis- en Natuurlyriek van Drs. P & Marjolein Kool)

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry, Part Four: the Chemistry Edition

(dinsdag 3 januari 2006)

Update: Machiel asked (rightly) for a link to his posts on Tom Lehrer, the last of which was indeed where I found the Tom Lehrer-page. So there we go: 1, 2, 3, and sorry for the delay.

This one is actually a song, by Tom Lehrer. My friend Frank, who is a physics teacher, has once sung it in class. I guess the two things one learns from this song are

1. There are very many elements
2. lots of them end in -ium

So here goes. You may listen to the song and watch a fancy flash-animation here.

There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium, (gasp)
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

Isn’t that interesting?
I knew you would.
I hope you’re all taking notes, because there’s going to be a short quiz next period…

There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium, (gasp)
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Hahvard,
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discahvered.

And now, may I have the next slide please? …carried away there.

(source)

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry, Part Five: End of the World Edition

(dinsdag 10 januari 2006)

This is said to be the cosmologists poem: will the Universe end in a fiery Big Crunch or will it keep on expanding and cooling down and end in an icy Big Desert?

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

(source)

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry, the Symmetry Edition

(dinsdag 17 januari 2006)

Symmetry is a very popular and useful concept in physics. (There’s even a journal on particle physics called Symmetry Magazine.) When confronted with a problem, it often helps to ask: does this problem change at all when I look at it… up-side down?… rotated over 90 degrees? … with time running backwards? … in a mirror? … with all charges reversed? …? Answers to these questions can simplify the problem considerably, sometimes even give you the solution right away.

This week’s poem deals with another kind of symmetry, not the useful but the fearful kind. It leads me to ask two questions that have little to do with physics:

1. Did “symmetry” rhyme with “eye” around 1800? and
2. Argues this poem for or against Intelligent Design?

By the way, this one really should be read aloud. Try it! Start quietly, so there’s plenty of room for the inevitable crescendo. (Is it inevitable? Where would you start and end it?)

The Tyger

Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake, ca 1794

Illustrated version here

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Mathematics Poetry

(dinsdag 24 januari 2006)

Just when I remembered I didn’t have a poem for the next installment of the TAPP, Dr. Hirta of Learning Curves (great blog name) comes to the rescue with There Was a Calculus Test From Nantucket. As you might have suspected, she asks for calculus test questions in limerick format.

Commenter kait provided the following gem:

A humanities person am I,
For these calculus probs make me cry.
Epsilon-delta? You see,
well, it’s all Greek to me.
I’ll just stick to lit classes. Good-bye!

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry: the Space Edition

(dinsdag 31 januari 2006)

Progress: we used to think there were Little Green Men on Mars. Now we know better:

A Martian Haiku

Red sand between my toes;
Summer vacation in outer space.

Robin Williams

there is red sand.

Tuesday Afternoon Physics Poetry, the Ornithology Edition

(dinsdag 7 februari 2006)

I imagine it might seem as though I think all sciences are physics. Which is not the case. I’m just too lazy to post only physics poetry, and / or broadminded enough to like poetry about other sciences just as well. I should have named the series Tuesday Afternoon Science Poetry, maybe.

Anyway, as spring is coming soon (I hope) and the birds are already singing, here’s a poem about a sparrow. It’s in Dutch, but I’m pretty sure that all you out there will understand it, even without using the babelfish in your ear. (Except maybe for the title, if you didn’t read the above lines.)

De Mus

Tjielp tjielp – tjielp tjielp tjielp
tjielp tjielp tjielp – tjielp tjielp
tjielp tjielp tjielp tjielp tjielp tjielp
tjielp tjielp tjielp

Tjielp
etc.

Jan Hanlo

(De Mus can be found on a wall in Leiden.)