Physics Limericks And Science Poems

A limerick is a five-line poem with a strict form (AABBA), which intends to be witty or humorous, and is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. It may have its roots in the 18th century Maigue Poets of Irelandhttp://www.irishfreckles.com/whtm/display_full.whtm?advisory_id=36, although the form can be found in England in the early years of the centuryAn interesting and highly esoteric verse in limerick form is found in the diary of the Rev. John Thomlinson (1692?1761):

1717. Sept. 17th. One Dr. Bainbridge went from Cambridge to Oxon Oxford to be astronomy professor, and reading a lecture happened to say de Polis et Axis, instead of Axibus. Upon which one said, Dr. Bainbridge was sent from Cambridge,?to read lectures de Polis et Axis; but lett them that brought him hither, return him thither, and teach him his rules of syntaxis.

From "Six North Country Diaries", The Publications of the Surtees Society, Vol. CXVIII for the year MCMX, p. 78. Andrews & Co., Durham etc. 1910.. It was popularized in English by Edward Lear in the 19th century.

The following example of a limerick is of unknown origin.

:The limerick packs laughs anatomical

:In space that is quite economical,

::But the good ones I've seen

::So seldom are clean,

:And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, held that the true limerick as a folk form is always obscene, and cites similar opinions by Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw,Legman 1988, pp. x-xi. describing the clean limerick as a periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity. From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function.

'Schrödingers cat is a thought experiment, often described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term Verschränkung''' ? literally, entanglement.http://www.proz.com/kudoz/german_to_english/architecture/1262119-verschränkung.html

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. This statement has been interpreted in two different ways. According to Heisenberg its meaning is that it is impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and velocity of an electron or any other particle with any great degree of accuracy or certainty. According to others (for instance Ballentine)L.E. Ballentine, The statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 42, 358-381 (1970). this is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher's ability to measure particular quantities of a system, but it is a statement about the nature of the system itself as described by the equations of quantum mechanics.

In quantum physics, a particle is described by a wave packet, which gives rise to this phenomenon. Consider the measurement of the absolute position of a particle. It could be anywhere the particle's wave packet has non-zero amplitude, meaning the position is uncertain - it could be almost anywhere along the wave packet. To obtain an accurate reading of position, this wave packet must be 'compressed' as much as possible, meaning it must be made up of increasing numbers of sine waves added together. The momentum of the particle is proportional to the wavelength of one of these waves, but it could be any of them. So a more accurate position measurement - by adding together more waves - means the momentum measurement becomes less accurate (and vice versa).

The only kind of wave with a definite position is concentrated at one point, and such a wave has an indefinite wavelength (and therefore an indefinite momentum). Conversely, the only kind of wave with a definite wavelength is an infinite regular periodic oscillation over all space, which has no definite position. So in quantum mechanics, there can be no states that describe a particle with both a definite position and a definite momentum. The more precise the position, the less precise the momentum.

The uncertainty principle can be restated in terms of measurements, which involves collapse of the wavefunction. When the position is measured, the wavefunction collapses to a narrow bump near the measured value, and the momentum wavefunction becomes spread out. The particle's momentum is left uncertain by an amount inversely proportional to the accuracy of the position measurement. The amount of left-over uncertainty can never be reduced below the limit set by the uncertainty principle, no matter what the measurement process.

This means that the uncertainty principle is related to the observer effect, with which it is often conflated. The uncertainty principle sets a lower limit to how small the momentum disturbance in an accurate position experiment can be, and vice versa for momentum experiments.

A mathematical statement of the principle is that every quantum state has the property that the root mean square (RMS) deviation of the position from its mean (the standard deviation of the X-distribution):

:\Delta X = \sqrt{\langle(X - \langle X\rangle)^2\rangle} \,

times the RMS deviation of the momentum from its mean (the standard deviation of P):

:\Delta P = \sqrt{\langle(P - \langle P \rangle)^2\rangle} \,

can never be smaller than a fixed fraction of Planck's constant:

:\Delta X \Delta P \ge {\hbar \over 2}.

Any measurement of the position with accuracy \scriptstyle \Delta X collapses the quantum state making the standard deviation of the momentum \scriptstyle \Delta P larger than \scriptstyle \hbar/2\Delta x.