Since Valentine’s Day was this week, it’s time for the next installment of my traditional Valentine’s Day Physics Poems. New readers, don’t let this drive you off, I only do it once a year! And if you actually like it, you can take a look at poems from previous years here.

Married to a Model

If you ever face a physics class distracted,
Rappers and footballers twinkling on their phones,
Then like an awkward youth pastor, interject,
“You know who else is married to a Model?”

Her name is Standard, you see,
Wife of fifty years to Old Man Physics,
Known for her beauty, charm, and strangeness too.
But Old Man Physics has a wandering eye,
and dreams of Models Beyond.

Let the old man bend your ear,
you’ll hear
a litany of Problems.

He’ll never understand her, so he starts.
Some matters she holds weighty, some feather-light
with nary rhyme or reason
(which he is owed, he’s sure).

She’s unnatural, he says,
(echoing Higgins et al.),
a set of rules he can’t predict.
(But with those rules, all else is possible.)

Some regularities she holds to fast, despite room for exception,
others breaks, like an ill-lucked bathroom mirror.

And then, he says, she’ll just blow up
(when taken to extremes),
while singing nonsense in the face of Gravity.

He’s been keeping a careful eye
and noticing anomalies
(and each time, confronting them,
finds an innocent explanation,
but no matter).

And he imagines others
with yet wilder curves
and more sensitive reactions
(and nonsense, of course,
that he’s lived fifty years without).

Old man physics talks,
that’s certain.
But beyond the talk,
beyond the phases and phrases,
(conscious uncoupling, non-empirical science),
he stays by her side.

He knows Truth, 
in this world,
is worth fighting for.