Tag: Atoms

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Ions by Patricia Hawkhead

rare blooms
a body blessed
with imperfect-ions

by Patricia Hawkhead

ion: a charged subatomic particle, such as a free electron, or an atom that carries a positive or negative electric charge having lost or gained one or more electrons.
 

Further reading:
‘The Effect of Negative Ions’, 2019, Jewell, T., HealthLine, available: https://www.healthline.com/health/negative-ions

Author bio:

Patricia Hawkhead’s haikai and poetry have been published in publications including: Asahi Haikuist Network, Blōō Outlier, Bones , Cattails, Cold Moon Journal, dadakuku, Echidna Tracks, Failed Haiku, Five Fleas (itchy poetry), haikuNetra, Poetry Pea, Presence, Prune Juice, Scarlett Dragonfly, Shadow Pond Journal, tsuri-dōrō and Haiku Universe. You can follow her on X/Twitter at @patricahawkhead

Read another sciku by Patricia here: ‘Pathogenders’.

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Class by Jerome Berglund

led
into gold . . conflict
of interest

by Jerome Berglund

It’s fascinating how black swan events and emerging innovations can effect scarcity and perceived value, one thinks of lab grown diamonds disrupting industry and also removing needs for exploitative mining practices. Here’s hoping they continue by making food readily accessible, water drinkable, air safe to breathe!

This poem is also about how divisive inequality is created intentionally, and removal of caste boundaries built on arbitrary material constructs is not desired by the opulent few in the upstairs most comfortable waited on hand and foot. But now thankfully… Robots, ai! Perhaps they can even eliminate brothels and patriarchy, servitude with Siri and company. Until Skynet gets a bee in its bonnet at least! ?

As per ABC News: ‘Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold atoms, achieving an ancient alchemist dream through modern physics.

The Large Hadron Collider is a giant particle accelerator that smashes atoms together at super-high speeds. Scientists there have found a way to knock three tiny particles called protons out of lead atoms, turning them into gold atoms.

Instead of crashing lead atoms head-on, the team behind this discovery looked at what happens when the atoms just barely miss each other.’

Further reading:

‘Scientists turn lead into gold for 1st time, but only for a split second’, 2025, Louallen, D., ABC News, available: https://abcnews.visitlink.me/tfEWuW

‘How CERN turned lead into gold (very briefly) in the Large Hadron Collider’, 2025, Petras, G. & Beard, S.J., USA Today, available: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2025/05/16/how-cern-collider-turned-lead-into-gold/83651264007/

Author bio:

Jerome Berglund, recently nominated for the Touchstone awards, graduated from USC’s film program, worked in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he has been employed as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Recently relocated to Louisiana, Jerome has exhibited many haiku, senryu and haiga online and in print, most recently in the Asahi Shimbun, bottle rockets, Cold Moon Journal, Failed Haiku, Frogpond, Mainichi, Presence, and Seashores. You can follow him on Twitter @BerglundJerome and find more of his poetry here: https://flowersunmedia.wixsite.com/jbphotography/post/haiku-senryu-and-haiga-publications

Check out more sciku from Jerome here.

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Uncertainty by John Hawkhead

switching off life support
we cannot know where
an electron is

by John Hawkhead

Due to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, we cannot know the exact location of an electron at any given time. The principle states that it is impossible to precisely measure the position and momentum of a particle like an electron simultaneously. We can only describe the orbitals or energy levels where an electron is most likely to be found in an atom.

Switching off life support is a difficult decision that allows a patient to die peacefully when curative treatments are no longer effective. It’s a key part of end-of-life care.

Many people believe in an afterlife or a continuation of existence for the mind or soul. There is no proof for such beliefs, but if it were true, we cannot know where or how that continuation might occur.

Sciku previously published in cattails journal April 2022. Editor’s comment from the journal: John Hawkhead takes us on an extraordinary journey. It’s starting point is a bleak one. There is no guidance to the reader about the circumstances of the patient, but we understand there is nothing more that can be done. Following this information comes a phrase which fully captured my imagination. It appears to reference the uncertainty principle, which is fascinating in itself. However, the juxtaposition of this ‘phrase’ with the initial ‘fragment’ set up multiple chains of thought in my mind. There is the ‘death’ of the machine as it is switched off and there is the death of the patient. The cessation of electrical activity within their brain, which we believe is responsible for consciousness. These ideas lead me back to the wording within the ‘phrase’. I picture an adult explaining ideas of death to a child, and the child trying to navigate its way through unfamiliar terrain, perhaps even touching on the nature of a soul and its continuation after death.

Further reading:

‘Where are electrons located within an atom?’, CK-12 Foundation, available: https://www.ck12.org/flexi/physical-science/atomic-nucleus/where-are-electrons-located-within-an-atom/

‘The uncertain location of electrons’, 2013, Zaidan, G. & Morton, C., TED-Ed, YouTube, available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ROHpZ0A70I

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@haikuhawk.bsky.social) is a writer and artist from the south-west of England. His work has been published globally over the last 25 years, including three books of haiku / senryu: ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’ (available from Alba Publishing. http://www.albapublishing.com/) and ‘Four Horse Parable’ (available from Nun Prophet Press).

Read more of John’s sciku here!

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Flickerings by John Hawkhead

migraine flickerings
sighting an electron stream
leave free radicals

by John Hawkhead

A free radical is an atom, ion or molecule with at least one unpaired valence electron and which are usually highly chemically reactive with short lifetimes.

They are formed either from other radicals or by breaking a covalent bond in a spin-paired molecule, leaving each of the fragments with one of the electrons in the original bond.

The author of this haiku suffers from migraines where vision is impaired in such a way that there appears to be a stream of electrical waves and particles across the eye.

Further reading:

‘Radical (Chemistry)’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(chemistry)

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

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!

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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:

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!

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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.

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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”.

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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.

Further reading:

What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics https://www.livescience.com/50941-second-law-thermodynamics.html 

Second Law of Thermodynamics https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/thermo2.html

Entropy and the Second Law http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py105/Secondlaw.html

Robert Erlandson has published in ‘Haigaonline’, ‘Daily Haiga’, ‘Cattails’, ‘Ribbons’, and ‘Prune Juice’, and a chapbook, ‘AWE’, speaking to the incredible relationships between nature, art, and mathematics. You can find more of his poetry, including some more physics-based haiga here: https://www.circlepublications.net/ 

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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.