"Schrodinger's Top Hat"

[bronze_ribbons]

This is an old poem of mine that appeared in Star*Line a ways back (July/August 2003). I'm reposting it here because it's still one of the better villanelles I've written, and because I'm being thumped by a quantum plotbunny (e.g., Dumbledore as Niels Bohr, Neville as Wolfgang Pauli, Draco as Werner Heisenberg, Lupin as George Gamow, Snape as Enrico Fermi...).



Schrödinger's Top Hat

Either there's a rabbit, or there's not,
but if you wait, a rabbit may appear
but even if you wait, it well may not.

Some might say that magic's merely rot --
a cheerful shake of superstition's snare.
Sometimes there's a rabbit, sometimes not,

but even if you skip the wheel and slot,
the sidewalks show more cracks from year to year.
Will your mother blame you? Maybe, maybe not.

It's hard to read the future when you're taught
not to cross each corner 'til you're there
whether rabbits wait for you or not.

And even if the scarves stay bright and taut,
will the coins fall freely from each ear?
Even if we wait, they well may not,

but 'til the fingers fail to catch what's caught,
joy can leap from nowhere like a hare:
either there's a rabbit, or there's not,
no matter if you wait for it or not.

~ pld

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

I like this. I recognize an allusion to A. A. Milne's poem about the bears. I also love the layering of magician images. It was also fun to read it out loud to my son.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Do you know, I hadn't actually met that poem until yesterday? Thank you.

(As I was telling another friend just yesterday, I don't at all mind other readers bringing/finding more in my writing than I initially intended, as long as they're not reading it as autobiography...)

And I am all a-glee at being read aloud to your kid. *celebrates it as a milestone in my career*

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

Young James Potter would make the perfect James D. Watson.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

*cackles*

It's a good thing I've already conceded to myself I can't possibly write it until next year. The cross-gen mechanics alone are enough to fry any spare neurons still in my vicinity.

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I was reading that link to Gamow, and have to put on my historian's hat for just a moment: Delbrück, like Gamow, was a physicist before he moved into biology. And the shift to DNA that the link characterizes as something like "abrupt and unexpected" wasn't really either; after World War II, there was a fairly significant "migration" of physicists into molecular biology. For some - Linus Pauling was one - this shift was prompted in part by a collective dissatisfaction with the way in which physics had been put to use during the war and in part by an interest in finding new areas of research to which they could apply their analytical techniques. It wasn't so much that they thought biology was "peaceful," but rather that they thought the questions biologists were asking could be answered through methods and analyses that were a standard part of physics. For those who objected to various events of the war, molecular biology offered them a whole new area to explore.

So the point of this is, I'm nitpicking that blurb about Gamow, even though it's not actually wrong. :^)

I really like that you like science.

(Neville, by the way, could be Linus Pauling. Good guy, very good at some things, but when he gets it wrong he no-holds-barred, damn-the-torpedoes gets it wrong.)

[aunty_marion]

...at which point I read that, and realise that either Luna or Trelawney is J.B.S. Haldane. My boss lent me My Friend Mr Leakey last week, and we what to know what he was taking!!

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I'm nitpicking that blurb about Gamow, even though it's not actually wrong

See, though, I enjoy this about you (and most of my friendlist, actually). Because there's "not actually wrong" and then there's different gradations of getting things right, and while I am willing to damn the torpedoes and facagowml when it comes to meeting deadlines, there are few things as sweet as truly nailing the facts/plot/rhymescheme/etc. into place. :-)

I really like that you like science.

The irony is that I'm dead inept at it. Microscopes defeat me (turns out my eyes don't work in stereo at all), calculus short-circuits my brain, and theoretical whifflings in any field leave me in a fog (be it physics, music, lit -- when Peter Wimsey said to the Warden that philosophy is a closed book to him, I totally knew what he meant). But it's all still pretty cool -- and because I'm so analysis/application-minded, in some ways I tend to connect with engineers and programmers much more readily than, say, other writers.

(Generalizing madly here, of course. Seeing that many of my friends inhabit both realms (and would indeed insist that sciences vs. humanities is a false dichotomy...)...)

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

(and would indeed insist that sciences vs. humanities is a false dichotomy...)

I love you for writing this. I have a very good friend who is a prominent scientist, and her dad was a historian and her mom, a Chaucer scholar. She very much insists that C.P. Snow's "two cultures" is a valid representation, and I just don't see how she can uphold this given her family's educational background. I think there are social differences between the sciences and humanities, but that any intellectual difference is socially constructed - at some point, it became cool to pass off a lack of interest/appreciation for one set of fields by claiming to be a practitioner of the other. (I get this all the time from engineering students who tell me that they shouldn't be graded on their writing skills because they're engineers and I'm not teaching an English class.) What I don't know is whether that came before Snow, or whether it's a result of Snow. As far as I'm concerned, there's no meaningful divide between the sciences and humanities.

I've been meaning to ask you if you have any apprecation for botanical prints. I have something I might like to send you...

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I get this all the time from engineering students who tell me that they shouldn't be graded on their writing skills because they're engineers and I'm not teaching an English class.

Saints love them, do they think they're going to have minions to handle all their communicating once they're in the real world? (Don't answer that, I know they do. Rant for a separate time.) My husband majored in mechanical engineering and aced English Comp -- which apparently flummoxed some folks, which I find weird, since my own school was ALL about fostering cross-disciplinary competence. (Granted, some of us were far less agile at hopping around than others, but my inability to process astro computations and German conjugations was my own problem, you know?)

*sigh* I know that Snow was influential in his time, but I've no idea how pervasive "two cultures" thinking is/was. I do think there are assumptions that arise from split-culture perceptions that can be a pain in the tuchis -- as the lone literature specialist on both sides of my immediate family (all of the men and my older sis-in-law trained as engineers), it does feel like I'm often operating with different defaults and postulates than the others, and I wonder if that's what your friend experiences when trying to talk about her work with her parents (especially if they're anything like mine -- "Well, why don't you try this? how come you haven't done that?" "It doesn't work that way in my field") but as you note, that's a socially manufactured gap, not an intrinsic divide.

Re: botanical prints -- don't know much about 'em, to be honest. Some I've liked, some not. (I know, so helpful...) If you do send the something (and I'm touched that you're thinking of it), advising me what to look for/appreciate wouldn't hurt. :-)

[aunty_marion]

(and would indeed insist that sciences vs. humanities is a false dichotomy...)
I love you for writing this.

So do I!

Just for your information, I took French, German and Maths for A-Level. Which completely bollixed up their teaching schedules, as at least two other classmates were doing a language and a science. And as far as I'm concerned, programming "languages" are just that - languages. I learnt to write basic programs in BASIC almost as easily as I learnt to write basic sentences in French or German or Latin. OTOH, I'm hopeless at actually doing physics or chemistry, or advanced Maths (which is why I only got an O-level pass at A-level!). My brain understands the theory of it all perfectly, but can't translate it to solve practical problems. Mind you, my brain understands foreign languages perfectly well, but has problems translating sometimes. I understand French in French.

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

Heh. My senior year in high school I was taking two sciences and three languages, all at different levels: Regents physics, AP Bio, French V, Spanish II, and Latin I. Because my school (and the state) assumed that no one would take more than one language and that no one taking first- or second-year languages would also be taking advanced courses of another discipline, I had the distinct pleasure of having all give exams fall within the same two time blocks. They parked me for the day in what they called "The Conflict Room" - where students had to take their tests when they had overlapping exams - and made me take all five sequentially. And my least-favorite teacher was the proctor for that day...

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Draco as Heisenberg?

*faints*

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Can't you just see him revising/reversioning/revisioning his little butt off after the War? *eg*

[marginaliana]

I really like this poem. I like the way it circles back, which also reflects the subject. I felt like the poem was sort of like a magic trick in itself. Very cool. :D

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Villanelles are so much fun -- I've got the beginnings of several more sketched out, but nothing's yet clicked...

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[(Anonymous)]

Peg poem!

Thank you for sharing; I do love this!

Mary

Re: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

*loves you back*

[jen-deben.livejournal.com]

*fangirls 4 u*

But I still want to read that Harry Potter/Quantum Pioneers fic. :D

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

In time, in time... I have such a crush on Gamow right now. I foresee burrowing into a heap of biographies and Tompkinsy goodness this fall...

[musigneus.livejournal.com]

One of the (many!) things that have dismayed me about the whole LJ strikethrough thing is your move away (although the feeds certainly help). With the unfriending I had a sudden panic that I wouldn't be able to read your poems anymore, so I came to check and was relieved to see your letter to your father unlocked. Then I saw this one, which I'd missed - Schrödinger! Great images, and I like the way it circles back at the end. Now I'll have to come back another evening and see what other treasures I've missed!

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Eep - did not mean to cause panic! FWIW, I've either deleted or unlocked all previously filtered entries (and will be doing so for the fandom journal as well) -- one thing I've never liked about the feature is that people can tell the locked entries are there regardless of whether they have access to the actual content or not, and it's a nuisance repeatedly stumbling into the error message when reading someone's archives using the previous/next arrow keys, so I've periodically deleted such posts in any case.

Even more important, though, I'm extremely flattered that you consider the poems worth (re)reading. Thank you for that.

[musigneus.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing them. As for rereading, I've read Strain many times, and A Letter to My Father. Between the Hints too, and I suspect I'm forgetting some that I've revisited!