DILEMMA Faith is often blind, and that seems tragic. It drops to its knees, humble and devout. Science’s problem is lack of magic. It can’t accept the mystical throughout. Each sees light stream through a prism of glass. The pious think of stained glass and God’s bliss, and all but simplicity they let pass. […]
Read more "Dilemma"While not included in Bard Of Mars, this is a limerick tribute to Professor Sara Seager of MIT, who kindly authored the foreword to the book. She also was inspiration for the haiku above and below. Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is a Professor […]
Read more "Seager, Ye Shall Find"Method A useful premise permits prediction or else it’s science fiction.
Read more "Method"UNPUBLISHED FINDINGS They granulate the universe to pulp, crashing particles only newly found. They figure their trajectories and gulp, “So much data upon which to expound!” Their energies unbound by quantum course, they separate the world we think we know. They rip particles into force by force. Unification’s where they say they’ll go. At last, […]
Read more "Unpublished Findings"CAN’T DIS CERN Take two Swiss clocks, Swiss for their precision; accelerate them near the speed of light; steer them into a direct collision to smash them with all available might. Splinter their casings and dislodge their gears, and, like they were some vogue, hotsy-totsy starlet involved in political smears, quick-snap pictures like the paparazzi. […]
Read more "Can’t Dis CERN"The lone quantum bit, unlike Frost, chooses both paths – interferes with self. The literary reference in this haiku is to Robert Frost’s poem: The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as […]
Read more "Unmeasured"When the general public hears about A breakthrough in scientific research, They want to add their voices to the shout, So as not to feel they’re left in the lurch. That they have opinions, there is no doubt. They’ll foist themselves into the dialogue, When something sensational’s put in print. Though their comments reveal they’re […]
Read more "Comments For This Entry Are Closed"NEUROLOGICALLY NORMAL Swimming in separate body oceans a variety of evolutions take place. In the dark, with secret motions, the neurons bunch in weird convolutions. Held gently afloat in nutrient brine, their dendrites mysteriously enlaced, they interact in ways hard to define, within the skulls in which they are encased. So they don’t become depressed […]
Read more "Neurologically Normal"“I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.”
– Paul Dirac to Robert Oppenheimer
“You forgot that science has evolved from poetry, and failed to see that a change of times might beneficently reunite the two as friends, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
FINE-TUNED FOR LIFE Ours is the perfect universe, it seems, for forming atoms that will let suns burn. Anthropically, there are few other schemes to give such a magnificent return. The arbitrary masses we’ve discerned for subatomic particles create a balance of the forces, we have learned, whereby life is allowed to generate. Change any […]
Read more "Fine-Tuned For Life"
BARD OF MARS 