20150711 (experiment and thinking)

Galileo at his handmade telescope

Inside the Large Hadron Collider

The history of science is muddied 

With alchemists wizards magicians

Who with mathematicians 

Decoded the world before us 

Which quite tidily proceeds 

Whether it’s understood or not

Been like that since before 

Archimedes luxuriated in his tub 

Pondering how he could tell 

The king his crown was pure

And be 100% certainly sure

Galileo cleaned up some

Gravity crap dropping two spheres

Of different weight from a tower 

Noting which hit the ground first

Each had a patron who covered the cost

Of these early ventures

This was a crown mind you

And who had a tower

Mr. Wizard and Tommy

Could have pulled off the same

Submerging ping pong and golf 

Balls in a pail of water or dropping 

Them from an attic window

If  Aristotle had but risen from his divan

To test observe and conclude

He’d have nailed Father of Science

Instead he sat back and thought

Which good enough on its own

Was only half of what was required

Many had thought and thought wrong 

Zeno of Elea thought himself into a cage

Motion’s impossible he proved

Had he thought more like Archimedes

He might have been Father of Calculus

Which new scholarship shows

Archimedes himself might have been

He he thought just a tad more

And written it down

Don’t throw the armchair out quite yet

Galileo didn’t need the tower after all

If he’d thought about cutting 

In half the heavier ball 

Now how fast would it fall

But the tower helped gather a crowd

Newton’s apocryphal tale of the apple 

Was a ruse to cover his gravitational insight

Of the cannon atop a mountain

Shooting a shell round the world like the moon

He topped it off with the math and voila   

Einstein did a number thinking what

It would be like on a train moving

Close to the speed of light 

Granted Michelson-Morley’s data

Figured therein Albert’s relativity ingeniously

Put time and space on a stretching new spin

Today’s tools though are so expensive

The Large Hadron Collider’s 

Seventeen circular miles

Six hundred feet underground 

Cost nine billion dollars

Before they turned it on

I doubt if some Venetian doge

Had that kind of pocket change

Nor Cambridge professorships salary

Much less the Swiss patent office wages

For all of the great glorious data discerned

They’re still all just numbers

Until someone in an armchair

Finds the last formula

c. J.S.Manista, 2015