Thought for the Week: Hunting the Higgs
'Hunting the Higgs' by Anne Cluysenaar
No wonder they love a laugh, the physicists.
What ever they find or don’t, it’s OK.
Symmetries of the world just remnants
of those which, if perfect, would only have led to
no world at all – anti-matter, matter
would have cancelled each other out. Maybe.
Or maybe not, if the theory is at fault.
And if it is? More exciting still.
Whatever we’re made of, it wants to know
how it came to be what it is. In us,
for a while at least, the stuff of stars
gets a glimpse of its own precarious life.
Like a single life, that will soon be gone.
Universes before, maybe, or after
our own, we won’t ever get to explore.
They make up what is, though. And here we are!
Anne Cluysenaar
1936 – 2014
‘January 13: Hunting the Higgs’ is from Touching Distances: Diary Poems by Anne Cluysenaar, published by Cinnamon Press. It is used with permission of Cinnamon Press. Anne was a member of Caerleon, Newport Meeting in Wales.
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.