Tag: Laws

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Rejection by Maryam Imogen Ghouth

Friction gives us lift.
Foot meets ground and body moves—
resistance births flight.

by Maryam Imogen Ghouth

This haiku focuses on biomechanical motion. It draws on the principle that friction—between the foot and the earth—is what enables locomotion. According to Newton’s Third Law, movement arises from force met with equal and opposite reaction. This haiku serves as a reminder: when we encounter opposition, it isn’t always a sign to stop—it may be the very friction that lifts us forward.

Further reading:

‘The Integration of Internal and External Training Load Metrics in Hurling’, 2016, Malone, S., et al., Journal of Human Kinetics, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5260590/

‘Ground Reaction Force’, ScienceDirect, available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/ground-reaction-force

‘Newton’s Third Law’, The Physics Classroom, available: https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/lesson-4/newton-s-third-law

‘Newton’s laws of motion’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, available: https://www.britannica.com/science/Newtons-laws-of-motion

Author bio:

Maryam Imogen Ghouth is a literary artist working across written, audio, and visual poetry. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including Sky Island and Last Leaves, and in award-winning films, such as Under the Sun. Her films, including Not Alone, have been awarded at over 30 film festivals.

Find out more at www.maryamghouth.com and follow Maryam on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/maryamghouth

Read more sciku by Maryam: ‘This Battle is Inborn’ and ‘A Little Pain Goes a Long Way’.

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Ye Cannae Change The Laws Of Physics by Mark Gilbert

four-limbed starfish
swimming against the tide
entropy machine

by Mark Gilbert

Nobel Prize-winning Theoretical Physicist Ernest Schrödinger (1887-1961), now famous for his cat (thought experiment), wrote a book called What Is Life? which tried to put biology into the context of Physics. Published in 1944, it predicted how genetic material would be stored in living things and stimulated the elucidation of DNA’s role nine years later.

The book also addressed the paradox that life, known to be exceedingly complex and ordered, seems to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the amount of disorder in an isolated system, its entropy, cannot decrease but tends to increase over time. One way around this paradox is to argue how ‘system’ is defined. But whatever their environment, all life forms appear to create order while increasing the disorder around them, for example by generating heat or other forms of waste. If they create more disorder than order then the Second Law would not be infringed, as Schrödinger hypothesised.

In traditional Physics, only simple systems in equilibrium were considered; however, life forms may be regarded as non-equilibrium systems. Some scientists have attempted to incorporate information theory into such ideas, complicating the concepts further, but I am sceptical of these anthropocentric approaches. As entropy cannot be directly observed or measured but must be estimated, there is room for discussion and further research, mostly theoretical, to keep scientists happy.

Further reading:

‘What is Life?’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F 

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

‘Entropy in Thermodynamics and Information Theory’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory

Author bio:

Originally a chemist, Mark Gilbert is based in the UK and enjoys writing short poetry and prose, which regularly appears in on-line and print journals and anthologies. With Eavonka Ettinger, he co-wrote Variations on the Planets, an astronomical poetry chapbook (Nun Prophet Press/Amazon). He is on Twitter at @MarkgZero.

Read another sciku by Mark here: ‘One-Word Haiku’.

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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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Progress by Dr Katy Roscoe

In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.

Second prize was won by Dr Katy Roscoe for her poem ‘Progress’:

Progress

The scratching and scraping of steel on rock,
In concert our muscles, they crunch and creak.
Slow inch by inch we chisel out the dock,
Ankles bound in irons, the hulls in teak.

Wiping sweat from my brow, I gaze afore:
I’m dazzled – bright sun, blue sky, white lime.
Ocean’s eternity returns ashore,
An excess of brightness ¬– like hope – can blind.

Night falls, men drive us into beached ships,
Dank air, sodden bodies, yellow fever.
Vessels for human cargo turned crypts,
If my body holds out, I will leave here.

Will I be able to retrieve the past,
Or will that monolith be all that lasts?

Background

My research is about convicts who quarried stone to build the naval dockyard at Bermuda, an Atlantic archipelago. Around 9,000 British and Irish men, many poor and starving, were transported there from 1842-63. Prisoners slept in decommissioned ships (hulks) which were dirty and crowded. Over 1200 men died there from effects of hard labour and yellow fever. Some went temporarily blind (opthamalia) from sunlight reflecting off limestone. “Retrieve the past” is a quote from a convict’s letter (1857). He hoped to be released under a “Ticket-of-Leave” in Australia, where he could earn an honest living, rather than return home.

Dr Katherine (Katy) Roscoe is a historical criminologist at the University of Liverpool with research interests centred on global mobilities, unfree labour and racial inequalities, with a particular focus on mid-nineteenth century crime and punishment in Britain and its former empire. You can connect with her on Twitter here: @KatyARoscoe

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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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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