Few are truly ecumenical in their tastes; most of us have our favored corners. My delight comes mostly from light verse, or poetry that was written before 1950. Not that the particular year is important, but I revert to a time before the confessionalists and post modernists, when poets were a little more reserved and when meter and rhyme still were thought to be worth the effort. So, here are the efforts of an unabashed “rhymer” on a set of projects ranging through, art, politics and science (plus a little personal history).
THE GOD OF THERMODYNAMICS
Believers sometimes evoke the Laws of Thermodynamics to prove the existence of God. The argument from the first law is as follows. The amount of energy/matter is constant, so it cannot appear out of nothing. Therefore, energy/matter must have a creator. The argument from the second law is that, if entropy is increasing, then we can extrapolate backwards to a time when the universe was highly ordered. This suggests an intelligent creator.
1. THE BELIEVER
My believing young friend said that God must exist,
he’d prove it both quickly and amicably;
he’d do so with argument hard to resist
and he’d do so thermodynamically.
Energy’s constant, no less and no more,
that God, so continued his elegy,
has created the total in view of the law—
the law of conserving of energy.
The second law tells of our cosmical prospect—
disorder gets greater and greater.
So all must have started as perfectly perfect
revealing, he claims, a creator.
My believing young friend said he is right to insist,
he’d completed his proofs now in tandem;
he’d unerringly proven that God does exist,
quod erat demonstrandum.
2. THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
The physicists I know are a miserable bunch
who like to ration energy and offer no free lunch.
They tell us mass and energy are delicately paired
in that famous formula that E is Mc2.
If by some mathematics you are prone to be un-nerved;
Einstein’s merely telling us that energy’s conserved;
there’s only so much energy, though much of it in mass—
the total stays the same, whatever comes to pass.
In the early universe things get so awful queer,
unfathomable density, within a tiny sphere.
But folks like Stephen Hawking, (everybody’s hero),
they say the total energy is just about at zero.[1]
If you think that’s silly and you wonder what the fuss is,
it all lies in the balance of the minuses and plusses.
But, if the total’s zero, and even though that’s odd,
then why do we need input from anybody’s god?
3. THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
Order into chaos is quite roughly what it means—
over time all structure is reduced to smithereens.
And, even if we both agree this second law is true,
proving that there is a god still leaves lots to do.
S is k log W, is not quite what it seems,
for order into chaos is but one of two extremes—
the formula that tells us so also must dictate
that order comes most likely from, a more disordered state.
Before this contradiction puts our heads into a spin,
consider, with what order did the universe begin?
Now scientists will posit that the entropy was low,
though why it should have started so, they simply do not know.
Now you would take this ignorance and fall into the trap
of raising the old chestnut that the god is in the gap.
And even if there is a god, the best that you can say is
he started with perfection and he turned it into chaos.
[1] “In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels out the positive energy represented by the matter”. Stephen Hawking, 1988, A Brief History of Time: From Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam Books, New York, Bantam Books . For a book length discussion of this issue see Lawrence Krause’s new book, A Universe from Nothing. **** 2012
SCHOOL UNIFORM
I remember those grey flannel trousers,
short pants with a button-up fly;
I remember grey shirts (and girls’ blouses)
and a permanent knot in my tie.
My mother bought grey flannel trousers
at a second-hand place in the town,
where folk from those grey terraced houses
bought kecks for a measly half-crown. [1], [2]
Only in fullness of time could
technology make us quite hip,
when every new pairing of pants would
have buttons replaced by a zip.
Despite all our gripes and our grouses,
this fashion passed some of us by,
for those who had second-hand trousers
still had a button-up fly.
Now those without lamb do with mutton ̶
my friends all had pants with a zip,
while I had to fumble a button,
my better-off mates let it rip.
I remember when Dad got his job back,
I remember the glorious trip,
I remember that wonderful gob-smack, [3]
when Mum bought me pants with a zip.
Notes:
[1] Oh the prejudice language arouses
for my generation and sex,
of course we would never say trousers,
we only wore pants or wore kecks.
[2] Half a crown was ⅛ of a pound in the old British currency.
[3] Gob-smack is British slang for a big surprise.