Physics, Maths And Poetry Inbetween
This week Twitter went crazy with references to 'The Waste Land' by T.S.Eliot (you can read the full poem here). It's a poem with depth and brings a spectrum of branches of knowledge together that's what i like about The Waste Land. Iain M Banks, "Consider Phlebas" draws its title from the same passage twitted by Mr. Musk. If you enjoy reading fiction, you will enjoy Consider Phlebas.
Another interesting poem, and this ones plays with Neutrinos, is Cosmic Gall by John Updike.
"Neutrinos they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed – you call
It wonderful; I call it crass."
'The Kiss Precise' by Frederick Soddy is pure mathematics poem that will make you smile. 😊
Soddy’s Formula:
If four circles A, B, C, and D, of radii r1, r2, r3, and r4, are drawn so that they do not overlap but each touches the other three, and if we let b1 = 1/r1, etc., then
(b1 + b2 + b3 + b4)2 = 2(b12 + b22 + b32 + b42).
In 1936 this formula was described as a poem, and my dad taught it to me as a poem i must have been around 4 years then. I enjoyed the first 7 years of my life on planet Earth as interactions with my dad were very intellectually stimulating. Here is the poem,
"For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
‘Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.
Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.
Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There’s now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend’s a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.
To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares."
What is your favourite poem on science or maths share in comments below?
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