BEYOND THE WATER DROP
From Big Bang to Eternity
A poem dedicated to our son Aaron on his birthday
From the explosive womb of Big Bang Hydrogen,
your progenitor was born
Consisting of single moving and opposite forces
Seeking companionship, and a need for Oneness
Bigger and more powerful than the self
And the atoms and elements and then the molecules of life
Were themselves given life
And then you my darling water
The purest of beings
Born with a gush from the amniotic sacs of Big Bang
Finding your way to virgin earth
Under forces beyond you
With forces in you
To enable all of life
For without you we would not be
The single droplet of rain hitting the puddle
With its kind but explosive kinetic force
Under the same original force that brought you to earth
Converting to a beautiful sound of the droplet on water
With an array of waves in perfect circle
As I ponder this wonder
The beauty of physics at its best
No energy destroyed, just converted
A simple yet not so simple action reaction of Newton
Snow, ice, vapor, waves of the sea, and a flowing river
Calming of the soul
Giver of life From Big Bang to Eternity
247b
Life is a series of waves to be embraced and overcome.
Some trajectories of a harmonic oscillator (i.e. a ball attached to a spring) in classical mechanics (A-B) and quantum mechanics (C-H). In quantum mechanics, the position of the ball is represented by a wave (called the wave function), with the real part shown in blue and the imaginary part shown in red. Some of the trajectories (such as C, D, E, and F) are standing waves (or “stationary states“). Each standing-wave frequency is proportional to a possible energy level of the oscillator. This “energy quantization” does not occur in classical physics, where the oscillator can have any energy.