Poem: Simplicities Entangled 4/6/19

As I stand here now, I’ve barely grasped the quantum alphabet.

At most, I can produce a few short words,

Stuttered out with uncertainty.

But I can see the simple beauty in each letter,

The gentle curves, the striking lines,

Shades of mathematical purple,

All flickering, shimmering with gauzy duality.

You cannot study the English alphabet,

And predict Joyce, Chaucer, Shakespeare or Woolf.

These emergent phenomena must be appreciated on their own terms,

With all their vibrance and subtlety;

So brimming with colour,

That their reflections are liquid crystal.

The emergent phenomena of quantum mechanics too,

Are Shakespeare, Chaucer, Woolf and Joyce,

For from quantum mechanics emerges life,

The very life of life.

It is Kalidasa’s day,

It is Van Gogh’s starry night.

This swarm of fundamental letters is the world we live in;

Each word, each thought, each living breath,

All arising from these wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful changelings of physics.

A myriad of sensations,

From simplicities entangled.