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.
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.'
Posted by: Peter Harvey | 26 August 2007 at 06:06 PM