Physics Archives - The Sciku Project

October 17, 2024October 17, 2024

Attraction by Jonathan Aylett

if an object’s mass
determines its gravity
explain butterflies
by Jonathan Aylett

An object’s mass is directly proportional to the gravitational force it generates, but in this haiku I am turning this on its head and asking why am I so drawn to something as light as a butterfly? The answer is obvious really (they are beautiful).

Further reading:

‘Mass, weight and gravitational field strength’, BBC Bitesize article, available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zsqscj6/revision/1

‘Newton’s law of universal gravitation’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation

Author bio:

Jonathan has been writing and publishing poetry for several years. His work has featured in journals dedicated to haiku, and broader literary journals, and won competitions across both disciplines. His collection ‘Goldfish’ – a mix of haiku and long form poetry, will be published by Stairwell books in spring 2024. You can follow Jonathan on Instagram here: @jonathanaylettpoetry

Read other sciku by Jonathan here: ‘Light’, ‘String Theory’, ‘Moss’, and ‘Dusty Shoulders’.

May 23, 2024June 20, 2024

Quantum Worlds by John Hawkhead

quantum worlds
my shadow as real
as I am
by John Hawkhead

One of the experimental tests used to determine the nature of fundamental quanta such as photons is the ‘double-slit aperture test’.

A stream of photons is projected towards a barrier with two slits. The result is an interference pattern on a screen beyond the slits that demonstrates the wave-particle duality of the photon.

One explanation for this duality applies the multiverse concept and theorises that particles from parallel universes interact with the photons being projected towards the slits. In this multiverse concept, the shadow areas in the aperture pattern ‘hide’ alternative universes. The theory is that ‘shadow photons’ are affecting the the photons in the double-slit experiment.

Similarly, the terms shadows and shades are often used to describe the dead when seen crossing back into this world from the ‘other side’ as ghosts or spirits. Is it possible that our shadows are experienced in alternative universes..?

Further reading:

‘Double-slit experiment’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

‘Many worlds interpretation’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/).

Enjoyed John’s sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘Dark matter’, ‘Chirality’, ‘Spooky Interaction’, ‘Dancing’, ‘Planetarium’, ‘Empty Space’, ‘Averages’, ‘New Beginning’, ‘Interactions’, ‘Surface Tension’ and ‘Shell Game ‘.

May 10, 2024October 10, 2024

Love: Expressed in the General Theory of Relativity by Scott Edgar

Our spacetime is warped
And your celestial body
Sets me in orbit
by Scott Edgar

The scientific basis of my sciku is the General Theory of Relativity. It’s been my experience that falling in love is governed by the same laws: e.g. A distortion of spacetime that draws me to the one I love.

Further reading:

‘General relativity’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

Author bio:

I am a lawyer by trade and poet by passion with a conceptual interest in physics and astronomy. I try to get lost in the deserts of the southwestern United States as often as I can. You can follow Scott on Instagram @poetdelayed.

Read more of Scott’s sciku: ‘The Universe’.

May 2, 2024June 20, 2024

Shell Game by John Hawkhead

waterfall rainbows
gnats scribble probabilities
in atomic shells
by John Hawkhead

In atomic physics and chemistry, electron shells (and subshells) are thought of as a series of ascending orbits that electrons occupy around an atom’s nucleus. Shells correspond to principal quantum numbers or are labelled alphabetically with the letters used in X-ray notation. Each row on the periodic table of elements represents an electron shell.

Each shell can contain only a fixed number of electrons. The numbers of electrons that can occupy each shell and subshell arise from equations in quantum mechanics, which state that no two electrons in the same atom can have the same values of the four quantum numbers that describe an electron in an atom completely:

Principal quantum number (n)
Azimuthal quantum number (ℓ)
Magnetic quantum number (mℓ)
Spin Quantum number (ms)

Further reading:

‘Electron shells’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_shell

‘Quantum number’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_number

Author bio:

April 11, 2024June 20, 2024

Surface Tension by John Hawkhead

surface tension
she dips a toe
into my silence
by John Hawkhead

Surface tension is the tendency of at-rest liquid surfaces to shrink into the minimum surface area possible. This allows objects with higher density than water to float on its surface without becoming submerged.

Surface tension results from the greater attraction of liquid molecules to each other (cohesion) than to air molecules (adhesion).

Further reading:

‘Surface tension’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension

Author bio:

This sciku was previous published in Human/Kind: A Journal of Topical and Contemporary Japanese Short-forms and Art, issue 1:1, p14.

March 21, 2024October 17, 2024

String Theory by Jonathan Aylett

string theory lesson
she plucks threads on her sweater
and I unravel
by Jonathan Aylett

This is a love haiku, a narrative poem in which the subject can’t concentrate on school because of their unrequited love for a classmate. It also alludes to string theory and the universal interconnectedness the theory points to.

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

Author bio:

Read other sciku by Jonathan here: ‘Light’, ‘Moss’, ‘Dusty Shoulders’, and ‘Attraction’.

March 7, 2024October 17, 2024

Light by Jonathan Aylett

coming through in waves
or particles, I can’t tell
October sunlight
by Jonathan Aylett

A classically structured haiku using the kigo “October sunlight”, which refers to the well known double slit experiment of quantum physics.

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Author bio:

Read other sciku by Jonathan here: ‘String Theory’, ‘Moss’, ‘Dusty Shoulders’, and ‘Attraction’.

February 8, 2024June 20, 2024

Interactions by John Hawkhead

bosons and mesons
all the stuff we talk about
just interactions
by John Hawkhead

In particle physics, bosons are subatomic particles whose spin quantum number has an integer value and which obey Bose-Einstein statistics. Examples of bosons include the Higgs boson particle and photons (light).

Mesons are a form of boson: they’re hadronic subatomic particles composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks bound together by a strong interaction. Mesons are the interaction agents between protons and electrons, but are unstable outside of the nucleus, decaying to particles such as electrons, neutrinos and photons. Despite their small size (0.6 times the size of a proton or neutron) and instability, they’re observable by particle detectors and have been used to study the properties and interactions of quarks.

Further reading:

‘Boson’, Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson

‘Bosons and Fermions’, Office of Science, US Department of Energy – https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsbosons-and-fermions

‘Meson’, Vedantu article – https://www.vedantu.com/physics/meson

‘Meson’, Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson

‘Meson’, Encyclopaedia Britannica article – https://www.britannica.com/science/meson

Author bio:

April 13, 2023June 20, 2024

Empty Space by John Hawkhead

bar talk
his atoms and mine
mostly empty space
by John Hawkhead

Atoms are 99% empty space, comprised of electrons in orbits around a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons. It follows then that approximately 99% of the human body is empty space with the remaining 1% (the electrons, neutrons and protons) being particles that have existed for billions of years.

At least this is the common mental image of an atom – the planetary model, originally proposed by Ernest Rutherford in 1911 and further refined by Niels Bohr in 1913. And yet…

Researchers increasingly understand that whilst electrons occupy discrete energy levels, they don’t always behave like discrete particles. Electrons are quantum objects – an electron is partly a wave and partly a particle. Under normal conditions an individual electron isn’t traveling in an orbital path through nothingness around its nuclei, but is instead spread out in an electron cloud.

As astrophysicist Dr Ethan Siegel says, “Inside your body, you aren’t mostly empty space. You’re mostly a series of electron clouds, all bound together by the quantum rules that govern the entire Universe.”

Further reading:

‘Due to the Space inside Atoms, You Are Mostly Made up of Empty Space’, Trevor English, Interesting Engineering: https://interestingengineering.com/science/due-to-the-space-inside-atoms-you-are-mostly-made-up-of-empty-space

‘Rutherford model’, Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/Rutherford-model

‘You Are Not Mostly Empty Space’, Ethan Siegel, Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/04/16/you-are-not-mostly-empty-space/

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/). Read more of John’s sciku here!

This sciku was previously published in MahMight haiku journal 2021.

March 30, 2023June 20, 2024

Dancing by John Hawkhead

photons
E=mc²
dancing
By John Hawkhead

Photons are some of the most fascinating particles in the physical sciences; fundamental particles of light that are the smallest possible packets of electromagnetic energy.

Albert Einstein’s mass–energy equivalence (represented by the formula E = mc²) gives the basic relation between mass and energy, stating that under appropriate situations mass and energy are interchangeable and the same. Yet photons have a rest mass of zero – they are massless particles – therefore should they even have any energy at all? And if they have neither mass nor energy then would they even physically exist?

E = mc² is actually a special case of the more general equation E² = p²c² + m²c⁴, where E is energy, p is momentum, c is the speed of light and m is mass at rest. Since photons have no mass, this equation becomes E = pc. Effectively, photons get their energy from their momentum and can never be at rest, constantly moving.

How they move has been the subject of study for decades, with recent research suggesting that photons can behave as both particles and waves (to find out more, check out the sciku ‘Spooky Interaction’, also by John Hawkhead).

This sciku plays around with the concepts of photons, square dancing and the randomness of measuring the path of photons.

Further reading:

‘Light has no mass so it also has no energy according to Einstein, but how can sunlight warm the earth without energy?’, Science Questions with Surprising Answers: https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2014/04/01/light-has-no-mass-so-it-also-has-no-energy-according-to-einstein-but-how-can-sunlight-warm-the-earth-without-energy/

‘Mass–energy equivalence’, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence

‘Does light have mass?’, Physics FAQ: https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SR/light_mass.html

Author bio:

‘Dancing’ was previously published in Failed Haiku 74 (1 Feb 2022).

February 16, 2023February 16, 2023

One-Word Haiku by Mark Gilbert

monopole

By Mark Gilbert

Similarly to the way that electrical charge is either positive or negative, magnetism generates both ‘north’ and ‘south’ poles. However, although single electrical charges are common (for example, a sodium ion, or an electron) a single magnetic pole has never been experimentally detected. Such an entity, a magnetic monopole, was first proposed by Pierre Curie in 1894, and its existence is predicted by various theoretical models of the universe. The search for such a monopole continues.

Like the elusive elementary particle, this minimalist haiku requires no content other than the monopole itself. It is up to the reader whether to supply the second, opposite, pole, through their own imagination, and therefore to balance the poem, or to decide that the single monopole cannot exist, leaving the haiku as a purely theoretical or imaginary quirk. I hope this may give an insight into the kind of conflicts suffered by theoretical physicists.

Further reading/watching:
‘Magnetic Monopole’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole

‘Why Are There No Magnetic Monopoles? Inflation and The Monopole Problem’, Chris Pattison, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Og9LI4PPM

Author bio:
Originally a chemist, Mark Gilbert is based in the UK and enjoys writing short poetry and prose. He has recently been published in Heterodox Haiku Journal, Five Fleas, Under the Basho and Horror Senryu Journal. You can connect with him on Twitter at @MarkgZero.

January 26, 2023June 20, 2024

Spooky Interaction by John Hawkhead

explaining photons
my side of the argument
neither here nor there
By John Hawkhead

Scientists argued for years about whether photons were particles or waves, but it seems that photons can behave as both. They are now known as ‘gauge bosons’ of force-carrying particles that enable interactions between matter particles and fundamental forces, and exhibit a third property known in quantum physics as ‘excitation’.

Dark matter theory suggests the possible existence of ‘dark photons’ as mediators of interaction between dark matter particles. Some experiments have indicated that interacting photons remain connected even as they move away from each other at the speed of light; therefore, appearing to interact faster than the speed of light. Einstein’s term for this was “spooky interaction at a distance”. As with other fundamental particles, it is not possible to know the location and velocity of a photon.

Further reading:

‘The wave-particle duality of photons’, Photon Terrace article, https://photonterrace.net/en/photon/duality/

‘Wave-particle duality and uncertainty principles’, section on Wikipedia entry for Photon, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon#Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality_and_uncertainty_principles

Author bio:

January 19, 2023November 22, 2024

Quantumku by James Penha

and soon haiku too
will wiggle syllables through
computer wormholes
By James Penha

“In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole… In their report, published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers described the result in measured words: ‘This work is a successful attempt at observing traversable wormhole dynamics in an experimental setting.'”

Quote from The New York Times article ‘Physicists Create ‘The Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’ from November 30, 2022.

Further reading:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-quantum-computer.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3

Author bio:

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. You can find out more about James’ poetry on his website https://jamespenha.com and catch up with him on Twitter @JamesPenha

Enjoyed James’ sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘DNAncient’, ‘If A Tree Talks in a Forest’, ‘Air-Gen-Ku’, ‘Boys Whale Be Boys’, and ‘Down Dog’.

April 14, 2022April 13, 2022

A Sciku for Rayner Explainer by Dr Michael J. Leach

the best science show
at the Fringe—sound & light waves
illuminate minds
by Dr Michael J. Leach

This sciku is a tribute to science communicator Rayner Explainer’s show A Flying Photon.

This show about the all-important photon—an elementary particle of light—has received excellent reviews, including but not limited to ones in InDaily, On The Record UniSA, and The AU Review.

Following sold-out shows at the Adelaide Fringe 2022, A Flying Photon won the Science at the Fringe Award presented by Inspiring SA. You can read more about the show’s topic in Rachel Rayner’s poem ‘Photonics’, which appeared in the debut issue of Consilience.

Check out more sciku by Michael, including ‘The Burden of Bushfire Smoke‘, ‘The Core Correlate of COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance‘, ‘Drug-Induced Hip Fractures‘, ‘The Psychopharmacological Revolution‘, ‘Quality of Life at Seven Years Post-Stroke‘, ‘The Early Impacts of COVID-19 on Australian General Practice‘, and ‘Australian Science Poetry‘ with science communicator Rachel Rayner. Michael also has another Covid-19-related sciku published in Pulse which is well worth checking out: ‘flu shot announcement‘.

April 8, 2022April 8, 2022

A Troika of Quantum Sciku by Jeffery Shevlen

Pauli Exclusion Principle

No suborbitals
Take electron pairs whose spins
consent to agree

Aufbau Principle

Electrons always fill
The lowest energy
Sub-orbitals first

Hund’s Rule

Before forming pairs
Electrons first fill each sub-
Orbital alone

These poems are broadly about the properties of atoms. More specifically they describe three simple rules that came from of the flowering of quantum discovery roughly 100 years ago. Each describes how electrons can populate the zones around an atom’s nucleus which are called orbitals. To me haikus, scikus, wonderfully compliment the subtle interactions of the subatomic realm. Egoless nature, all the way down.

Wikipedia devotes three pages to each of the three axioms. For a more detailed explanation wikipedia is a fine place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufbau_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hund%27s_rule_of_maximum_multiplicity

Jeffrey Shevlen is a stay at home dad and therefore a lifelong, if somewhat bruised, learner. He sends greetings from Ontario, Canada, formerly “Your’s to Discover”, now “A Place to Grow”.

February 5, 2021February 5, 2021

Entropy by Robert Erlandson

The second law of thermodynamics is a fundamental law of nature. One expression of this law states that the level of disorder in the universe is steadily increasing. Entropy is a measure of the system’s disorder, higher entropy means more disorder.

The image above is known as a ‘haiga’ – a coupling of poetry and imagery, the idea being to create a third art form that is greater than the sum of its parts. Below is an alternate version of the poem that takes the same starting point to create a tanka.

Axiogenesis by Alicia Sometimes

surplus baryons >
    antibaryons. Whirling
             QCD axions

I was fascinated by the etymology of this word. In Greek ‘axía’ (worth, value, merit) and ‘génesis’ (production, creation, formation, origination). Here, axiogenesis is a mechanism in which the cosmological excess of baryons (a type of composite subatomic particle) over antibaryons is generated from the rotation of the QCD axion.

Raymond T. Co & Keisuke Harigaya (2020) outline how Axions Could Explain Baryon Asymmetry – the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.111602

Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, writer and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems and more. She is director and co-writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. She is currently a Science Gallery Melbourne ‘Leonardo’ (creative advisor). Her TedxUQ talk in 2019 was about the passion of combining art with science. You can catch up with her on Twitter @aliciasometimes and at her website www.aliciasometimes.com

Enjoyed Alicia’s sciku? Check out her earlier poems ‘Antimatter’ and ‘The Born Rule‘.

August 21, 2020September 3, 2020

The Born Rule by Alicia Sometimes

wave functions are squared
amplitudes oscillating
predictions            likely

By Alicia Sometimes

The Born Rule — a formula for assigning outcome probabilities — is extremely complex for someone like me who hasn’t studied physics but I am intrigued in its history and its purpose.

Marc-Oliver Pleinert et al. (2020) test Born’s law using many-particle interferences. This article Mysterious Quantum Rule Reconstructed From Scratch by Philip Ball was inspiring and helped me navigate some intricacies of the Born Rule and put it in a wider context.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.012051

Enjoyed Alicia’s sciku? Check out her other poems ‘Antimatter’ and ‘Axiogenesis‘.

May 21, 2020May 21, 2020

Five and almost of a kind by Andrew Senior

I
Never let it be
Never let it be
forgot seeing is feeling
in another form
Sight the light of the blind
Sensation spent in a brain
II
I am most at home
I am most at home
in my imagination
as when science meets
crafted art, sees gravity’s
engines burning in the stars
III
Atoms are the shoes
Atoms are the shoes
of shape. We put them on to
walk this world. Smitten
with them we gallop over
its edge and into the dark
IV
How clever we are
How clever we are
to see what’s coming writing
on bark and spelling
with sticks taken from what had
already deciphered light
V
How dark a pupil
How dark a pupil
looks amplifying light’s streams
exchanging shadings
for meanings when trees convert
them only to be their lives

These five poems, “Shorts” as W.H. Auden used to call them, are part of a long series of meditations in poetry and essay about humility and ignorance, language and its limits and hence also the limits of knowledge. All in the context of science, particularly physics which is my over-riding interest.

Andrew Senior’s lifelong interest in science began as an often bed-ridden sickly child around the age of eight or nine with Astronomy. His professional career was in IT in the world of Unix/Linux servers. But Andrew never gave up an interest in science which by then had expanded from physics into biology courtesy of the best layman source there then was: The Scientific American. Long retired Andrew has continued these interests much assisted by the Internet, puzzling over the ruthless determination of humans to acquire power, gambling with their own extinction in the classic casino manner.

February 16, 2018February 16, 2018

Foibles of research

Manipulation?

Coercion? Unwanted guests?

Foibles of research.

Academia prides itself on being fair, rational-minded and logical. Yet the practice behind these noble aims is sometimes far from that. A study by Fong & Wilhite (2017) reveals the various manipulations that can take place: from scholars gaining guest authorships on research papers despite contributing nothing to unnecessary reference list padding in an effort to boost citation rate. These instances of misconduct are likely a response to the pressures of an academic career – the demand for high numbers of publications and citation rates.

The survey of approximately 12,000 scholars across 18 disciplines revealed that over 35% of scholars have added an author to a manuscript despite little contribution (with female researchers more likely to add honorary authors than male researchers). 20% of scholars felt someone had been added to one of their grant proposal for no reason. 14% of academics reported being coerced into adding citations to their papers by journals, whilst 40% said they’d padded their reference list to pre-empt any coercion. Whilst changes to aspects of the academic system might help alleviate these issues, it’s likely to be a slow process.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0187394

January 12, 2018August 14, 2018

Underground sound

Listening for sound

whilst deep underground requires

middle ears to hear.

Animals living in different environments will face different auditory challenges. To investigate how environment shapes evolution Koyabu et al (2017) compared middle ear morphology across terrestrial, aquatic and subterranean species from the order eulipotyphla (including hedgehogs, moles and shrews).

They found that a subterranean lifestyle involved adaptations that allow for improved sound transmission at low frequencies and reduced transmission of bone-conducted vibrations. The adaptations observed included “a relatively shorter anterior process of the malleus, an enlarged incus, an enlarged staples footplate and a reduction of the orbicular apophysis”.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170608

May 8, 2017November 8, 2017

Renegade liquid

Renegade liquid –

negative mass pushing back

breaking second law.

One of the fundamental aspects of Newton’s second law states is that when an object has a force applied to it, it moves in the same direction as the net force. Khamehchi et al (2017) created a liquid of negative effective mass (a Bose-Einstein condensate) that breaks this principle: when it is pushed it accelerates towards the pusher.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.155301

May 5, 2017August 14, 2018

Road-safety

Road-safety crucial:

Engine noises distract from

predator odours.

Noise pollution can have a number of effects on wild animals. Morris-Drake et al (2016) found that road noises meant that dwarf mongooses were slower to detect a predator odour and did not increase vigilance in response to the odour (whilst mongooses exposed to normal ambient noise found the odour faster and showed increased vigilance).