#scipo

No matter how close we get, it seems as though we are always one angstrom apart, usually even more.

A wonderful submission about the strange quests of scientists...

How far can poets go, then,

down into 'icle physics?

To discover parts of subatomic mass,

so small it is beyond minute

and, in just a second, what happens is

really unbelievable, beyond imagination. 

Protons collide with protons 

and create a random mess 

of particles, so mini and invisible,

that they cannot find them all!

There's one they really had to find: 

and ten years on, they found top quark.

So small it was that it could not be seen

or heard or measured, but they did...

they did, the clever buggers, they did!

I can see and hear and feel him

stirring in his grave; Albert is excited

at the very thought of contemplating

the distinct possibility that space-time,

(that is the space-time he invented)

could actually be outside the universe

or is that what he meant by relativity?

Is it perhaps, therefore inside itself?

Who will win the race to tell?

We know they'll find a smaller particle

[they say they know of one already] that's

smaller than top quark, so small it cannot be,

it couldn't even exist, until another brain

turned it round and called it by

a human name; Higgs-Boson is...

Well, he is like a wanted criminal

only, so romantic, all the greatest

physicists and philosophers of the world

want a piece of him, or her.

They have a huge accelerator, 

deep under mountains, under ground,

where no harm can come to us.

They justify the billions by saying

that the quest is so enjoyable;

so much a part of human instinct

to enquire about the boundaries,

[if they exist at all] of our perception..

..of reality, by physics and philosophy.

The journey's worth the cost, they say,

but all the poets, they know so much more.

  They know the nature of the universe

may be measured in very 'icle parts,

so small, so infinitesimally small,

that we suspect they are beyond

description using epithets. Oh no,

they're under the spell of mathematics!

No earthly words suffice, not there.

Even the ancient Greeks didn't know this;

their Alpha has been squared, and will

Omega cubed and integration, calculus

return the answer they all crave?

Or will the search for ultimate smallness,

through fuzziness, get us to the end?

Is the start to finish of a shrinking universe,

rather like a journey round the Circle line?

So we could arrive back at the point

where it all started; where we all began:

four dimensional Space-time Relativity.

The structure of the universe, a hologram?

Could we be a product of our imagination?

To recapitulate, then, we are in search

for something that is so damned small,

that we can't see it, hear it, measure it

in any human way at all!

And yet, theoretical physicists claim

that one day soon, they will exclaim

Eureka! We have found Higgs-Boson!

But if they can't describe it mathematically,

the beginning and the end of everything

is the poetical imagining of unreality.