The Moon in Those Wild Magma Years

("The Moon May Have Had a Heavy Metal Atmosphere with Supersonic Winds,"
by Lisa Grossman, Science News, June 2017)


We thought we knew the moon:
pale and cool, the hard-working
servant of love, myth, tides,
Americans, and a genre called horror.

Turns out in its youth, the moon
was a crazy ball of magma, so hot
it vaporized metal and forged
an atmosphere, which brought

winds so blastful they made
waves in magma. (Surf this, bro.)
Finally this heat-addicted sphere
went straight, got clean, dried

out.  It slept it off under blankets
of sodium snow. When it awoke, it
had pock-marks. With chill indifference
it received cordial light from the sun.



hans ostrom 2017

Particular Thief

"With more data, suspected new particle vanishes." Science News, 3 September 2016, p. 13


If scientists had long suspected
the particle, why didn't they take
more precautions? They left more
data in plain sight. The particle
vanished, taking data with it.

This wasn't a case of quantum
hiding, a small physics joke,
or a Schrödinger shuffle. No.
This was theft. Obviously,

the particle thought more data
would reveal too much about
its identity. What exactly
was it trying to keep secret?
Perhaps crimes against
other particles. Maybe a particularly
unsavory past. Hard to say.



hans ostrom 2016

The Is-and-Seems Theater Presents

"Electrons will be depicted as clouds of probabilities."

--Rachel Eherenberg, Science News, 13 June 2015


Sometimes seems makes Is palatable. Other
times Is wrecks Seems and levels
dreams to rubble, a lot to be cleared.

Art and science are Seems, despite
their claims to Is. They're our
symbolic social recreation of

material Is, that mystery in
plain site which hurtles
like a meteorite. Sometimes

it seems as if we know
nothing. Even our knowing something
may lead to that conclusion.

There's a profusion of
possibilities, the immanence
of Is, the atmosphere of Be.



hans ostrom 2015