The quantum physics poem

Although I worked in geological and botanical organisations, I've got a fairly broad grounding in the other sciences, and quantum physics has always fascinated me. 

Back in 1998 I walked the Fife Coastal Trail in five sections over some summer weekends, and I managed to write a poem in each section. Four of them were first published in the magazine Fife Lines, but this one wasn't taken. It did come out in Snakeskin, and in 2011 I put it in the Kindle edition of Seven Senses, where it's in the company of the other Fife walk poems. It's available from Amazon, where I've published several out-of-print titles. It pleased me to imagine Fife fishermen named Heisenberg and Schrödinger, and to place the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's cat paradox in their watery context. I also love the Scots word 'plouter'. It's what I do. It's what most of us do. 

I haven't quite managed to write a poem about collapsing wave functions, but some day I might.

The physics of fishing
(Fife Ness, 1998)

An eider arrows over the waves.
In the depths below the bobbing floats
Heisenberg’s lobsters may, or may not,
lurk in each weighted pot.

The uncertainty is resolved
when Schrödinger gaffs
the suspended line, reels in,
and curses every stolen bait
and empty creel,
in the manner of all Fife fishermen,
then plouters home through the swell
to poison his cat.


Colin Will


Copyright © Colin Will, 1998, 2011