Everything is made of Up
And its soul mate, Down,
Bound by forces stronger than a wizard's charm,
With a swirl of electrons to top
It off. What I find strange
Is that four other quarks exist, useless to the bottom
Of their little souls. Their lifespans skim the bottom
Of discernible time, used up
In immediate decay. Take the one called Strange:
It morphs into Down
So fast that its serving of life has a scoop of death on top,
Giving its tiny mass an evanescent charm.
And that itself is the charm
Of quantum physics: getting to the bottom
Of some will o' the wisp that can nearly top
The speed of light. Or looking up
The mysteries of existence and nonexistence, pinning down
The ephemeral, reflecting on truth most strange.
Yet the brave quantum world and the strange
Things in it take on a mundane charm
When applied to, say, a cat. It all comes down
To the fact that Puss, from her head to her bottom,
is made of electrons, and Down, and Up --
Whiskers, paws, and tail, with all the fluff on top.
If their fanciful names seem a little over the top,
Understand that quarks were discovered in the sixties, when strange
Forces in the human world inspired the geniuses who thought all this up.
Their imaginations caught the whimsical charm
Of the times, like hawks catching thermals from the desert bottom
Of hard fact. So it is that protons are made of Up, Up, Down,
And neutrons of Up, Down, Down,
Bound by the strong force and spinning like tops.
With the swirl of surrounding electrons, they are at the bottom
Level of all matter. So what strange
Meaning can we attach to the remaining four quarks? Are Charm,
Strange, Top, and Bottom the stuff of the creatures we make up?
Perhaps whenever an artist or writer jots down the details of some strange
Beast or flower, Top lifts his mate in a dance, and Charm
Plants one foot on the bottom of Reality Mountain, in the nanosecond before their time is up.