Commentary on that physics poem
James Joyce be damned
Physics poetry is pretty rare.
It was with a bit of astonishment as an undergraduate physics major that I found this particular poem from 1975, hidden in the back of a paper I was given to build a senior project around:
I often drop this poem (some might say TOO often), as it captures quite a few things in addition to the suggestion for knots as an explanation for particle physics. There’s some context here that needs to be understood though:
Why J/psi?
So the quark proposal had been floating around for a number of years and was gaining some adherents at this point (a full cultural analysis is surely out there which I haven’t looked into, but clearly there was some dynamic going on in terms of idea adoption). There were also people who thought that the quark proposal seemed pretty phony and artificial.
When the J/psi particle was announced it created an interesting situation - up until that point, only 3 quarks (up/down/charm) had been invoked to explain the observed zoo particles to any satisfaction.
The J/psi was unexpected and unpredicted and forced the invocation of the 4th ‘strange’ quark to account for its existence. This clearly struck a number of people as totally unnatural and ad-hoc - how many more quarks could you propose? (at least 6 it turns out.)
The entire event was a bit of a red flag for certain professional physics folks. Some of them even wrote POEMS about it.
Who was Roger Edgar Clapp?
Roger Edgar Clapp was an important enough guy that his personal papers were considered worth of keeping track of. Since the internet isn’t that trustworthy, here’s a screenshot of his bio from there:
Oh, he was a student of Julian Schwinger who ended up at MITRE! This isn’t just a poem by some shlub like me - no, no - this is a physics poem by someone who was IN THE SYSTEM doing lots of serious work. One wonders how it got from him to that particular paper (Did THOSE authors slip it in, or was it done at the journal level? unclear.) Puzzles always remain in any historical imaginings.
What sort of topics was he talking about?
Huh. Mobius theory of electron excitation. You know, I feel like i’ve heard that one before. Hell, Vincent Crist has a whole website now about the topic, so clearly the bug has bitten him. It’s too bad that John Williamson and Martin van der Mark are passed- they would have had some fun debates with Vincent about the quicycle model. We are all wrong to some degree, but it’s interesting when you notice substantial conceptual overlap cropping up from a lot of different places….