by Pathematica
Lvx cælestis
qve in omnibvs incidit
sed pavcvm illvminat
Imagine dreams that James Clerk Maxwell dreamed
When piercing eyes looked up, by chance, to stare
Across the Scottish fields, where furrows streamed
About the gentle grandeur of Glenlair.
Imagine thoughts that Albert Einstein thought
When fortune beckoned through the window pane,
Revealing Speichergasse, newly wrought
In Maxwell’s light, emblazing Memory Lane.
The Friday afternoon meanders by
And daydreams fill the grindstone-wearied mind.
The sunbeams through the casement catch the eye
With sparks of inspiration for mankind.
For life presents this treasure to us all:
We see the light—and rise—or blink and fall.
The light of heaven
Which falls on everybody
But enlightens few
Author's note:
For the poem "Lux Caelestis" to make sense, it is necessary to know that (it is alleged that) James Clerk Maxell was inspired by the sight of the furrows in the ploughed fields around his family home at Glenlair, Scotland, to describe electromagnetic radiation by a "force field" using vector calculus to raise his famous equations. Albert Einstein acknowledged that he had been inspired by Maxwell and that relativity was implied by his equations. The patent office in Bern at which Einstein worked was located on the corner of two streets: Genfergasse ("Geneva Lane") and Speichergasse ("Memory Lane" - one of the lines in particular will not make immediate sense without this). Also, the German pronunciation is required for correct scansion.
Little Planck Big Bang Whence the Cosmic Background Sprang
A circa deca-terra-yotta-yotta-Planck-scale-age ago,
The common a priori sense of space and time by which we know
Our universe and where we stand and when we stand in temporal flow
Could not have grasped the ambient state of singular existence.
For at that time, when Edwin Hubble's most inconstant constant stood,
When viewed in retrospection at the limit in the neighbourhood
Of nought inverse, the universe was packed so tightly that it would
In all its length and breadth and depth have covered zero distance.
And lacking space in which to do it, tempus did not fugit then
For space and time were both confined in ways beyond the wit of men
Till parasometime parasomewhere paracame the moment when
The biggest bang that never was nor ever will be started.
All hell broke loose; all heaven too; and, trapped between, the mortal coil
Was seething as the cauldron's charge when fires burn and potions boil
And quantum foam erupted forth uplifted on the ergofoil
Decanting in the shattered place where spacetime bounds had parted.
Imprisoned in the virtual space, the lords of gauge and gravity
Embarked upon a fragile truce, imparting supersymmetry
Along the Planck; the entente ranged until the fickle harmony
Was broken on divisive schemes fomenting in the chaos.
And caught within the tortured space where hammerhead and anvil meet
Supported by the naked force with which the æther was replete
Strange phantom lights and ghostly forms flipped back and forth twixt mass and heat
While surfing superluminal inflation into cosmos.
A change in phase ripped through the foam as gravity unlocked from gauge
And baryons with quark and gluon plasma formed amidst the rage
To live and die in fleeting lives that came and went throughout an age
When symmetries in symmetries remained as yet unbroken.
But break they would as cyclic groups divided force in finer forms—
Electroweak and nuclear strong emerged amidst the raging storms
And quarks condensed with quarks held fast by bosons, yielding hadron swarms,
Till time had reached one second (as the words of men are spoken).
Expanding still, with no escape, the energy, by stretching thin
In adiabatic cooling, made neutrinos run and leptons spin
In matter and in antimatter—both would fight but one would win—
And by ten seconds, photons filled the heavens in its glory.
The nuclei of hydrogen and helium emerged in time
At first without electron shells, to glow, in ever cooling clime,
Three hundred eighty thousand years, as blinding plasma reigned sublime—
But then the light was freed to show astronomers the story.
