Bigger Than Large, Smaller Than Tiny

I've always been quite interested in science but also terrible at doing it. In chemistry classes, the math confused me, and when I read "mole," I thought of the underground animal. I was terrible at measuring things--hence I'm one of those intuitive cooks who glances at a recipe and then estimates the measurements. (The professional chefs on TV seem to do the same thing, so I feel vindicated, even as my fare is simpler than theirs.) I didn't like doing experiments that were just exercises, either. I wanted the teacher just to tell us how much sodium was supposed to be left over after the reaction and be done with it--and tell us what the point was.

I read, but do not understand much of, such books as Einstein's Universe, Cosmos, and Hawking's book about the universe. I read Science News with fascination and buy Scientific American at the airport every so often. I like it when scientists tell me more about how things work, although they change their minds a lot. Since I first studied science--after a fashion--in grade school, the universe seems to have gotten a lot bigger, the particles seem to have gotten a lot smaller, and the artist's rendition of what an atom looks like has change completely. Every so often, I have this sneaking suspicion that scientists just make things up, like poets. I mean, how am I going to check up to see if their new drawing of the atom is accurate? I can't ask an atom.

On CNN yesterday, I saw a report about an enormous stream of gamma rays and x-rays leaking out of what they now call a "super black hole." The stream is so enormous that it can wreck a smaller galaxy if it runs into it and, of course, fry any planets in said galaxy. The astronomer said the stream could last another 100 million light years, which he said wasn't a very long time in the context of the life of the universe. CNN showed what it claimed was a picture of the stream. The thing looked like a blue river in space. For all I know, it was photo-shopped. . . .One hundred million years is a "relatively short time"?! And here I was thinking it takes a long time to pick up a package at the post office during the holiday season.

Anyway, a while back I decided to summarize, in a short poem, my sense of the universe, focusing on "units"; of course, the "units" by which scientists measure things seem to change often. I remember when atoms used to be the smallest "building blocks" of matter; it turned out, however, that atoms were made of smaller building blocks, in a manner of speaking. Here is the poem, which I envisage as an extremely short chapter in a "science" book (which makes me think of that guy on NPR who whimsically claimed to have "a Master's Degree--in Science!!"):

Units: An Introduction

by Hans Ostrom

Everything is made
of little units, which
are made of even smaller
units. The smallest units,
undetectable by us, are
reality. All units larger
than these are rearrangement,
illusion, phony structure.
They constitute a kind
of molecular cinema
watched by us and
understood by God,
who is exempt from
the unit-arrangement.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, copyright 2006 Hans Ostrom.