I was doing some end-of-the-year housecleaning on my computer, and stumbled across this poem — an unrhymed sonnet on symmetry breaking in the early universe. (Always aiming at the least common denominator, what can I say?) <\/p>\n
I have no misconceptions about my poetic abilities, which is no doubt why it sat privately on my hard drive for so long. But it’s the holidays, so here you go.<\/p>\n
The cosmic maelstrom boiled bright and fierce,
\nA thousand fields did gambol nearly free.
\nMomentum was exchanged so high and hot
\nThat couplings did asymptote to nil.
\nAmidst the glue and bosons ‘lectroweak
\nThere stood our pensive scalar doublet, Phi
\nSurveying a potential all about
\nLike Buridan’s ass, secured by symmetry.
\nA longing pulled these spineless complex fields,
\nTo rest where energy was minimized.
\nBut held by finite temperature effects,
\nThe quarks and leptons bound symmetric state.
\nYet nothing perfect lasts through cosmic time,
\nThe universe expands, illusion breaks.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was doing some end-of-the-year housecleaning on my computer, and stumbled across this poem — an unrhymed sonnet on symmetry breaking in the early universe. (Always aiming at the least common denominator, what can I say?) I have no misconceptions about my poetic abilities, which is no doubt why it sat privately on my hard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12677"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12680,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12677\/revisions\/12680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}