Cosmic Gall

This morning, the why is irrelevant, I picked from my bookshelf a rather yellowing  copy of The Faber Book of Science, Edited by John Carey.

It is a wonderfully entertaining and educational  anthology of scientific writing. The poem below was from "An Explanatory Statement of Elementary Particle Physics', by M.A. Rudderman and A.H. Rosenfeld, in American Scientist.

                                                                        Cosmic Gall

Every second, hundreds of  billions of  these neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during the day and from below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth

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.

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's wonderful; I call it crass.

Comments

[Peter Harvey]

There were two atoms sitting at a bar. One said, 'I lost an electron yesterday.'
'Oh no,' said the other. 'Are you sure?'
'Oh yes,' replied the first atom. 'I'm positive.'