Sunday, January 23, 2011

Fruit Analogy

A Swedish scientist explains how a hadron collider
Smashes protons together to find new particles.
He holds out various fruits to help illustrate the process.
Here is the pear; the pear is a proton.
Here is the grape; the grape is a top qwark.
Here is a squash; the squash is a graviton.
I am a down’s syndrome boy learning long division,
And I feel his great cognitive strain to convey his ideas
In a way that regular people will understand.
His eyes glitter with secret knowledge,
The unfathomably colossal intellect,
The understanding shared only by super-geniuses.
Nations pour out their treasuries for men like him.
Architects and engineers devote their lives
To building massive mile long steel tunnels.
Cranes hoist structures the size of skyscrapers,
Install complicated scientific measuring devices,
Exert a trillion gigawatts of human ingenuity
To construct this stepping stone to total enlightenment,
And I watch this all on the television set
Alone in my parents’ upstairs living room,
Eating cupcakes and sipping an energy drink,
Wondering what poem I’ll write for my blog tonight.
There is a universe of thought you will never know,
And you are never as smart as you think you are.

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