The Seekers and the Photon

The Seekers slogged through Plato’s cave of doubt,

cloaked in night ‘till light encroached to cast

their lives as fleeting shadows on the ground.

The Seekers reached for me, but they could not

see past the cave to which they were confined.

So they reached only the reflection of understanding.

The Seekers, with not a hint of understanding,

thought physics would clear away their doubt.

Newton called me a particle, a corpuscle confined

to his theatrical prison of objects, his boring cast

of balls and spheres and other what-nots.

Someone, please save me from Newton’s underground.

Thomas Young ran Newton’s theory aground,

he shot two slits in Newton’s understanding.

Young labelled me a wave, an insult! I was not.

Yet his pompous British eyes saw no doubt.

They gazed at interference patterns I cast,

an intensity of amplitudes most refined.

Young rejoiced in light’s diffraction he defined,

‘till Einstein gunned his stardom to the ground.

With photoelectric ammo, a physicist outcast

shattered even Young’s theory long-withstanding.

In 1905, I plunged physics again into doubt,

the Seekers’ understanding reduced to naught.

Neither wave nor particle, with momentum but not

mass, was I a golden snitch they could not find?

In time the Seekers climbed back out of doubt,

stopped shooting one another to the ground.

The laws of classical mechanics, notwithstanding,

the united Seekers began to mold a quantum cast.

Shot again through two slits, an entity outcast,

I passed through both, tied up in multiversal knots,

to ask which one I went through was misunderstanding.

If Dostoevsky’s crystal palace was certainty refined,

then certainly I lived in Dostoevsky’s “Underground.”

To find me, one must learn to cling to doubt.

During all these years spent to cast away the doubt,

the Seekers never did find out who I was, only what I was not.

For my true name lies beyond their ground of understanding.