Tiny Specks

...How small everything is!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artist: Gaurav. Licensed under Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.  The original image can be seen at http://lh5.ggpht.com/_qZgEIPGL3_M/Sshgbrqy3tI/AAAAAAAAEHA/9uxKw8ClUA0/quantumuniverse.jpg

 

 

 

Tiny Specks

 

     “Everything is so small…”

 

 

Oh, tiny speck of space and time¹

Adrift in endless seas

How large the world must seem to you--

Stretch to infinity!

 

Oh, tiny speck of hadron² soup

How lonely you must be!

No others near, as you're steeped in

Dilute, electron sea

 

Oh, tiny speck of iron³ and stone

And blue with azure seas

You are but dust--I smaller still

You once seemed big to me

 

And you’re ' speck, too--you isle of stars⁴

Pinwheel of heaven’s seas

With telescope--not microscope--

For you, eye strains to see

 

And tiny speck--you Universe⁵

Afloat yet greater seas!

Oh yes, it's true! All things are small--

A wonderment to me

 

 

©2010 Richard Puetter

All rights reserved

 

 

Notes

 

¹At the finest scales, space and time are quantized into a roiling sea of particles of space-time.  These particles are of the smallest size and duration that make sense to talk about physically.  They are the Planck time and Planck length, 5.39x10^-44 seconds and 1.62x10^-35 meters, respectively.

 

²Hadrons are particles, such as a protons and neutrons, that are made up of quarks and held together by the Strong Nuclear Force.  So we’re talking about an atomic nucleus, here.  If we assume we’re talking about a hydrogen atom, the proton has a roughly exponentially decaying charge distribution with an RMS radius of roughly 8.77x10^-16 meters.  The electron cloud surrounding it is roughly the size of the Bohr radius (5.29x10^-11 meters), or roughly 100,000 times larger than the size of the nucleus.  This is also about as close as another nucleus can come to another atom’s nucleus in a molecule as atomic bonds are of roughly this size.  So a nucleus is alone and really sitting in a dilute sea of electrons.  To keep track of our jumps in scale in this poem, a hydrogen atom is roughly 10²⁴ times (a 1 followed by 24 zeros) larger than the finest division of space-time.

 

³The earth has a molten iron core.  The earth’s radius is roughly 6.4x10⁶ meters--the Earth is not perfectly spherical, the poles being flattened relative to the equator.  So the Earth is roughly 10²² times bigger than a proton.

 

⁴The Milky Way galaxy, the home of our solar system, is a giant barred spiral galaxy, one of the largest kinds of galaxies.  There is only one other giant spiral in the Local Group of 20 or so galaxies, and that is Andromeda.  The rough radius of the Milky Way is 50,000 light years, or about 4.73x10²⁰ meters.  So it is about 10¹⁴ times bigger than the Earth.

 

⁵The Age of the Universe is now known (to 1% accuracy) to be 13.7 billion years old.  So that also gives the size of the Universe to be 13.7 billion light years, or roughly 1.3x10²⁶ meters, making it roughly 3x10⁵ times larger than the Milky Way.  So the size scale spanned in this poem is from the Planck length to the radius of the Universe or roughly a 10⁶¹ times change in scale.  Now, of course, we’re not really done. Most physicists today believe the Universe is just a tiny “bubble” in some larger, multi-dimensional reality.  How big is that?  Well the question is not even really appropriate since we can’t even properly define what we mean by “size” on this “otherness” of existence.  Our concepts simply fail.  But if we could make some proper definitions, I am confident that we’d find our universe to be an incredibly small speck.

Reviews

[Great Aunt Astri]

This poem really reads well. Lovely rhythm which keeps you wanting to know more.
When I was young the boys used to say that the universe was in someone's test tube. I argued that if we were in someone's test tube then they must be in someone's even bigger test tube, and so on ad infinitum. But thank goodness that the world is big enough for us to write poems.

[Muse]

Like how a single grain of sand must feel on the beach. I liked this poem because it reflects your brain and personality. I enjoy the creative, scientific, nerdy side of you. A very clever write my friend! May I suggest a pic of CERN, the large Hadron Collider. Fascinating stuff!

[Augustus]

I thoroughly enjoyed this poem and being a student of physics myself, I did not require the author's note (although it is essential to have one for this poem). I love the way you have put orders of magnitude in perspective and amongst other things, provided a lovely illustration of what physicists mean when they ask "Small with respect to what???"
People often believe that science and poetry have nothing in common. But I think you have shown right here that it isn't true. Science can truly be poetic. Feynman once said something along the lines of "What kind of a poet can talk of Jupiter as if it's a person but not be excited by the fact that it's a gigantic ball of ammonia?" and I do agree with him.
On the technical (in terms of poetry, not physics!) side, I really admire your control over structured verse. It made this piece particularly delightful.
I truly loved this one!

[Fabian G. Franklin]

Ahhhhhhhh....THIS is going into my favorites! I absolutely love it. I hear the nutrinos have been clocked going faster than the speed of light recently...undermining Einstein's theory that nothing travels faster than light...they should get a speeding ticket for that. Where is the passing lane for moving faster than light? (laughing) Of course, I've never believed that time was the neat linear thing that science has often presented it as being...it SEEMS so...but that does not MAKE it so. It does not FEEL so to me. And I am a being very much in touch with my feelings...that is a difficult thing to try to explain but I think by now you have some understanding of what I mean. This piece has great meaning and depth to me...I read much between the lines as well as in the lines...I do not know if I am intended to do so but I have done so from my youth and it's a bit late to change the habit now. (laughing) This is simply fabulous!

[Gobinder Singh Dhindsa]

I like whole writing. It has deep message. Really lovely writing.
Lucky!

[Clockwork]

I really liked how you focused on the smallest particles of the universe, yet still made larger connections to the universe as a whole. References such as the one to the earth's core was really masterful. I thought the description "blue with azure seas/You are but dust" was really beautiful.

This is a wonderful adventure through what it really means to be part of the cosmic picture.

[*~DreamDeamon~*]

Love how you put the two things that most people would never think could go together.. together. I like it and Im glad i was understand all of what you ment (cuz your citations are long) but hey other people will need them. Fantastic flow! Good Write!

[Murtuza]

I never knew Science could be so interesting even in poetic form. I greatly enjoyed reading this piece :)

[JENY]

Wow…
A theme..related to celestial bodies…
It is very rare…
It is wonderful….
Liked the writing so much….

[erik_nihil]

I think I liked the citation-definitions better than the poem. But I liked the poem too. It was concise and progressed from small to large, from quantum to relativity, you could say. I like the metaphor of 'seas' to all the media where matter exists, although the rhyme seemed to struggle in a couple of spots, most of which occurred in the fourth stanza. Sea and see are not rhymes, and although the simplicity of the scheme is part of the charm of the poem, this 'rhyme' stands out and announces itself, which stops the flow of the poem. Also, the awkward grammatical hop by leaving out the article in 'you're [a] speck, too' causes another pause, all in the same stanza.

Otherwise the poem is sharp and simple, and since all the problematic characteristics exist in that fourth stanza, i think if you concentrated your efforts there the whole poem will balance out where all the language is at the same level.

[AG]

This was more than mystifying to read. I loved how you played with space and volume and how beautiful your portrayal of contrasts are.