I dream in tensors, sleep in curves,
A fabric bent by mass that swerves—
Space and time, a unified song,
Where gravity has whispered long.
A point—no width, no height, no breadth,
A singularity spells time’s death.
But in the depths, a passage hides,
Through quantum seams, where dark divides.
A wormhole yawns, its throat aglow,
Two mouths that neither age nor know
The clocks we trust—what if they lie?
And stars are tunnels in the sky?
Where would it lead, this bridge we name,
From here to there, through flame or frame?
Perhaps to you, or somewhere free—
A loop in space, where I might be
Not bound by now, but yet—to be.
To love Physics one just has to care
For the universe heart described there,
Relativity's Laws
Are much like Santa Claus,
Einstein's Tensors just floating on air.
Brian Johnston
August 22, 2014
Poet's Notes:
Just one hundred years ago this poem would have had a different ending...
Newton's Vectors just floating on air.
Post Einstein however things are both simpler and more complicated as physicists
struggle to come up with an equation that describes everything! To help laymen
perhaps just a little, a 'Vector' is a mathematical expression for a force that has a
direction (in three dimensions). A Tensor, though it is hard if not impossible to
imagine except by means of a mathematical expression (a physicist cannot see it in
his mind either) , can be thought of as a multi-dimensional Vector that can occupy
more than three dimensions. Hope that helps! Ha! It seems that God's simplicity is
not that simple for man! Who would have guessed?
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