April 2022
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
wexelblatt@verizon.net
Author's Note: One of the books I received this year as gifts – or assignments –is about the lives and obsessions of early twentieth-century theoretical physicists; a second devoted a chapter to their work. I’m not, to put it mildly, a physicist, not even theoretically. Still, I enjoyed learning about the bizarre quantum realm and the strange minds of the physicists who explored it. One of them declared that the minuscule domain is so uncanny it couldn’t be described by metaphors. Nevertheless, my reading provoked twenty lines, a poem of a sort.
L’Amour Quantique
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. - Werner Heisenberg And what if it turns out we are, like light, waves one moment, particles the next, not intimate incarnate facts but clouds of probabilities? And what if, like electrons, we can only claim a fixed abode when rummaging around for it? And what if that elusive but vital article we call the self is a species of whirling fictions, a petite nebula and no mini-star? And what if your brown eyes, fragrant hair, thrilling voice, just-so nose, your serious yet kindly mind and that holy hollow behind your knee, are no more than a cherished yarn I tell my spinning self? What if the you I love is nothing like the you you are to you?
©2022 Robert Wexelblatt
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