In honor of Valentine’s Day, a physics-themed poem I wrote a few years ago, about unrequited love.

Measurement:

 

I once took a measurement

It was a simple, two-body problem,

Solvable. Not Poisson’s mess.

Two particles, drifting, perhaps entangled.

I wanted to know two things:

Position, and momentum:

Where they were, and where they might go.

 

I perturbed the system

Like a good scientist, I interacted, and observed,

Added input, caused change.

Then I knew their positions.

They became tightly entangled,

Bound together,

And there was no way of knowing

Any way they could change.

 

I should have remembered:

In quantum systems

The observer is always involved;

And a three-body problem

Has no solution.