Non-locality

[PrinceMyshkin]

In contemporary physics
there is a theory of non-locality
which means, as I understand it,
that everything is happening everywhere
at one and the same time.

In fact, that time is a construct
to keep yesterday apart from tomorrow,
that which happened
from that which we hope or fear,
much as the Trans-Canada
connects Halifax with Hamilton
but also keeps them apart.

[AuntShecky]

Liked all of this, especially the second stanza, or as the intelligensia like to say the "strophe." Wondering why you said "construct" instead of "construction" though I've seen the shorter form used as a noun befpre. The concrete imagery of the two Canadian cities on a map is just the thing to bring the abstract idea of the
first "strophe" down to earth.

[Sapphire]

An interesting way to explain this physics concept :)

[breathtest]

Wow this is incredibly thought provoking and an interesting idea about the existence of time

[AuntShecky]

Wondering why you said "construct" instead of "construction" though I've seen the shorter form used as a noun before.

I just looked up the word "construct" in the ol' dictionary and saw that there is indeed a listing for "construct" as a n.: "something synthesized or constructed from simple elements, especially a concept."

This is exactly how you used the word in your piece! So, Prince, I feel like a real dumb cluck, and hope you'll forgive your ol' auntie.

[Pendragon]

Physics as poetry...sublime!

[PrinceMyshkin]

I just looked up the word "construct" in the ol' dictionary and saw that there is indeed a listing for "construct" as a n.: "something synthesized or constructed from simple elements, especially a concept."

This is exactly how you used the word in your piece! So, Prince, I feel like a real dumb cluck, and hope you'll forgive your ol' auntie.

If I might praphrase that rebarbative statement by Erich Segal, Being someone's auntie means never having to say you're sorry to him!

[Lynne50]

Wow! It's amazing what you can learn from two stanzas of words. Very impressive!
Thanks.

[Taliesin]

I liked the poem, but.. is it also true?
I am not very familiar with physics (that means for me that I am not a professional physicist) but am rather interested in it - and in lots of places, it tends to be quite counterintuitive - you know, to every problem there exists an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. As my physics teacher used to say - at the end of the school the kids know that an electron is a very tiny ball spinning around the nucleus that is coloured blue and has a small minus sign on it.

[PrinceMyshkin]

An interesting way to explain this physics concept :)

Thanks, Sapphire.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Physics as poetry...sublime!

Many thanks for that although unintentionally, you've hit on a sore spot. When I was first introduced to Physics in high-school I remember thinking that the basic theorems were beautiful! Beautiful metaphysical poetry, that is, but I seldom had a clue which of them to apply in the problems we were presented with and that may have discouraged me from studying further a subject that, along with consciousness, most deeply interests me: that is, cosmology. Without math or physics I feel I'm a hungry traveller in a foreign land where I don't know enough of the language or customs just to ask for a piece of bread.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Wow! It's amazing what you can learn from two stanzas of words. Very impressive!
Thanks.

And many thanks to you, for your comment and also your signature. Here's a poem I wrote once for/about Anne Saxton:


ANNE SEXTON


She's trying to skip herself
like a wrong-sided pebble
across the wide water,
she's taut
on her mind's thin edge,
slicing,
and calling on everyone to save her.


What did she do
until she discovered poetry
which, she said, would save her
(it didn't) or before she wrote letters
all day, her hand held out in front of her?


Poetry? It's a shirt that has to be turned
and turned again, a hand
flung hard as you can
away from the heart. She stands
at the shore of white sound, surveying the waves,


but the pebble skips back on itself,
and the castaway hand
strikes back, twice as fast,
at the heart, that unskippable stone.

J. Newman Sudden Proclamations copyright 1992

[Lynne50]

PrinceMyshkin...After reading your poem, I really want to read a biography about her.
I loved your line...Poetry? It's a shirt that has to be turned and turned again...

That is so true. One has to read and savor, read and savor so it just melts into your heart. (That wasn't too melodramatic, was it?)

Did Anne Sexton ever get to read your poem?

[PrinceMyshkin]

I liked the poem, but.. is it also true? What a wonderful but alas unanswerable question!! Among the many varieties of "truth" available to us - the truth of physics, the truth of religion, the truth of poetry - each of us must choose according to his or her needs and discernment. But with surely no more familiarity with physics than you claim for yourself, I do not know enough to evaluate the truth of non-locality or the maddening theories of Quantum Dynamics, of particles that are simultaneously waves but always no more than tendencies.


I am not very familiar with physics (that means for me that I am not a professional physicist) but am rather interested in it - and in lots of places, it tends to be quite counterintuitive - you know, to every problem there exists an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. As my physics teacher used to say - at the end of the school the kids know that an electron is a very tiny ball spinning around the nucleus that is coloured blue and has a small minus sign on it.

"Counterintuitive" is just the word! It reminds me too of what a spokesperson for a Jewish movement called Polydoxy once said: "Fifty percent of what we believe is not true - and we never know which fifty percent it is."

If we could only live with that; if we didn't always need to know what is true - or more to the point, to persuade or bully others to believe what we think we know to be "true".

[PrinceMyshkin]

PrinceMyshkin...After reading your poem, I really want to read a biography about her.
I loved your line...Poetry? It's a shirt that has to be turned and turned again...

That is so true. One has to read and savor, read and savor so it just melts into your heart. (That wasn't too melodramatic, was it?)

Did Anne Sexton ever get to read your poem?

I don't believe I'd even heard of her until after her suicide so, no, she never saw my poem. Her last collection of poems was called The Awful Rowing Toward God, with a possibly intended ambiguity in the the word "awful." That is, is it the rowing that is awful, or the people who are doing it despite a lifetime of violating their rights to be with God?