All a top physicist knows

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely, it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
In which a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our yes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet euclidean space:
Exploded myths - but who
Would feel at home a-straddle
An ever expanding saddle?

The passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really becomes a creature
Who comes in a a median size,
Or politicising Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.

W.H.Auden, After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics,
in dark matter poems of space, selecção de Maurice Riordan e Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Ed. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, p.54-55





BBC,Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong?(2010)

Partes II , III , IV , V e VI .