This is a poem by Felix Gagliano, a member of the Athens Library Poetry Group.

 

“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

–Noted physicist Richard Feynman

IYQ 2025*

In the wee world where particles dance,

quantum physics has begun to prance.

A realm revealed where nature plays

by astonishing rules in a mystic maze.

Invisible waves weave through space,

entangled in a baffling, tight embrace,

Particles are paired, light years apart,

yet linked by a shared, quantum heart.

There’s duality in each photon’s beam,

both wave and particle, or just a dream?

Schrödinger’s cat in a paradoxical rest?

Both alive and dead, a quantum jest?

Quantum’s wonders are now on view,

a sub-atomic world, strange but true.

A cosmic dance, of chance or fate,

in every particle, a universe’s weight.

At very small scale. odd reality unfurls.

Even parallel lives lie in quantum’s swirls,

In each dimension where we now glance,

is the illusion of time and happenstance.

This challenges many basic assumptions

and previously sacrosanct presumptions.

With bewitching beauty we are newly blessed,

now ubiquitously, majestically made manifest.

 

Felix Gagliano, February 2025