Monday is Valentine’s Day, so I’m following my yearly tradition and posting a poem about love and physics. If you like it, be sure to check out my poems from past years here.

Time Crystals

A physicist once dreamed
of a life like a crystal.
Each facet the same, again and again,
     effortlessly
         until the end of time.

This is, of course, impossible.

A physicist once dreamed
of a life like a crystal.
Each facet the same, again and again,
      not effortlessly,
	   but driven,
with reliable effort
input energy
(what the young physicists call work).

This, (you might say of course,) is possible.
It means more than you’d think.

A thing we model as a spring
(or: anyone and anything)
has a restoring force:
a force to pull it back
a force to keep it going.

A thing we model as a spring
(yes you and me and everything)
has a damping force, too:
this slows it down
and tires it out.
The dismal law
of finite life.

The driving force is another thing
no mere possession of the spring.
The driving force comes from

    o u t s i d e

and breaks the rules.

Your rude “of course”:
a sign you guess
a simple resolution.
That outside helpmeet,
doing work,
will be used up,
drained,
fueling that crystal life.

But no.

That was the discovery.

No net drain,
but back and forth,
each feeding the other.
With this alone
(and only this)
the system breaks the dismal law
and lives forever.

(As a child, did you ever sing,
of giving away, and giving away,
and only having more?)

A physicist dreamed,
alone, impossibly,
of a life like a crystal.

Collaboration made it real.

It’s Valentine’s Day this weekend, so time for another physics poem. If you’d like to read the poems from past years, they’re archived with the tag Valentine’s Day Physics Poem, accessible here.

Passion Project

Passion is passion.
  
If you find yourself writing letter after letter,
be they “love”,
or “Physical Review”
  
Or if you are the quiet sort
and notice only in your mind
those questions, time after time
whenever silence reigns:
“how do I make things right?”
  
If you look ahead
and your branching,
             uncertain, 
                   futures,
each so different
still have one
               thing
                      in common.
  
If you could share that desert island, that jail cell,
and count yourself free.
  
You’ve found your star. Now it’s straight on till morning.

It’s Valentine’s Day, time for my traditional physics poem. I’m trying a new format this year, let me know what you think!

Cherish the Effective

Self-styled wise men waste away, pining for the Ultimate Theory.
I tell you now: spurn their fate.
Scorn the Ultimate.
Cherish the Effective.
 
When you dream of an Ultimate Theory, what do you see?
An answer to your every question?
Every worry,
Every weakness,
Resolved?
A thing of beauty?
A thing of
       your notion
              and only your notion
of beauty?
 
Nature, she has her own worries.
Science, she never stops asking.
Your fairytale ending?
You won’t get it.
And you’ll hurt, and be hurt, in the trying.
 
You need a theory that isn’t an ending.
A theory you
              only
                   start
                          understanding
But can always discover.
No rigid, final truth,
But gentle corrections.
And as you push
                The scale
                           The energy
Your theory always has room for something new.
 
A theory like that, we call Effective.
A theory you can live
                      your
                           life
                                with.
It’s worth more than you think.

It’s that time of year again! Time for me to dig in to my files and bring you yet another of my old physics poems.

Plagued with Divergences

“The whole scheme of local field theory is plagued with divergences”

Is divergence ever really unexpected?

If you asked a computer, what would it tell you?

You’d hear a whirring first, lungs and heart of the machine beating faster and faster.

And you’d dismiss it.
You knew this wasn’t going to be an easy interaction.
It doesn’t mean you’re going to diverge.

And perhaps it would try to warn you, write it there on the page.
It might even notice, its built-in instincts telling you, by the book,
“This will diverge.”

But instincts lie, and builders cheat.
And it doesn’t mean you’re going to diverge.

Now, you do everything the slow way,
Numerically.
You need a different answer.
Dismiss your instincts and force yourself through
Piece by piece.

And now, you can’t stop hearing the whir
The machine’s beating heart
Even when it should be at rest

And step by step, it tries to minimize its errors
And step by step, the errors grow

And exhausted, in the end, you see splashed across the screen
Something bigger than it should ever have been.

But sometimes things feel big and strange.
That’s just the way of the big wide world.
And it doesn’t mean you’re going to diverge.

You could have seen the signs,
Power-counted, seen what could overwhelm.
And you could have regulated, with an epsilon of flexibility.

But this one, this time, was supposed to be
Needed to be
Physical Truth
And truth doesn’t diverge

So you keep going,
Wheezing breath and painstaking calculation,
And every little thing blowing up

It’s not like there’s a better way to live.

Valentine’s Day was this week, so long-time readers should know what to expect. To continue this blog’s tradition, I’m posting another one of my old physics poems.

 

Winding Number One

 

When you feel twisted up inside, you may be told to step back

That after a long time, from a long distance

All things fall off.

 

So I stepped back.

 

But looking in from a distance

On the border (at infinity)

A shape remained

Etched deep

In the equation of my being

 

A shape that wouldn’t fall off

Even at infinity.

 

And they may tell you to wait and see,

That you will evolve in time

That all things change, continuously.

 

So I let myself change.

 

But no matter how long I waited

How much I evolved

I could not return

My new state cannot be deformed

To what I was before.

 

The shape at my border

Is basic, immutable.

 

Faced with my thoughts

I try to draw a map

And run out of space.

 

I need two selves

Two lives

To map my soul.

 

A double cover.

 

And now, faced by my dual

Tracing each index

Integrated over manifold possibilities

We do not vanish

We have winding number one.

 

It’s that time of year again! Valentine’s Day was this week, so to continue this blog’s tradition it’s time for me to post one of my physics poems. I wrote this back before I fully understood quantum field theory, so you’ll have to excuse any inaccuracies in the metaphor (at least on the physics side 😉 ).

 

Perturbation Theory II – Going in Loops

 

In order to interact, two particles must collide.

But a particle is a small thing, moving in its own circles, covering little space in its lonely life.

So we will never interact.

 

But particles emit bosons,

Tiny messengers of force,

Tendrils of interaction.

When these find us,

As they sometimes do,

We can interact.

 

But a boson is a small thing, moving in its own circles, covering little space in its lonely life.

So we will never interact.

 

But each boson has its own retinue,

Particles and their bosons in turn,

Spawned from its self-energy, uncertainty in its own nature,

Each, unobserved, with infinite possibilities.

 

And to compensate for these infinities

The charged nature of our naked selves

Must in turn be infinitely repressed.

 

So perhaps interaction would still be understandable

For those with simple repressions,

Matching constraints.

 

But we are not such people.

Complicated beings, we spin and twirl.

We hide our charge behind an infinity of possible terms,

So we can never know

If we will interact.

 

But perhaps we are not simply isolated points.

Perhaps we have extension,

Dimension,

Reach, beyond the confines of zero-dimensional selves.

And with that reach

Perhaps we can understand.

Perhaps

We can interact.