A Physicist Aptly Named Bohr...

Scientists waxed poetic at the first-ever Society of Physics Students (SPS) poetry slam last month. At first, none of the 30 students gathered in Lyman 426 were willing to open their mouths—and it wasn’t just because of the eggplant pizza on the table.

Luckily, Arthur R.H. Baum ’05 broke the ice with a limerick paying homage to the man who inspired the event:

There once was a guy named Dave Morin.

One day through the sky he was soarin’

With velocity v

For a time delta t

And he traveled a distance v delta t.

Not waiting for the analysis of the literary critics, Baum deconstructs the poem himself. “I used the nonstandard AABBB rhyme scheme because physicists continually encounter the unexpected as they explore the mysteries of the universe,” he says.

The impetus for the slam was David J. Morin, elder statesman of Harvard physics poetry, who suggested the idea to SPS. Morin, the head teaching fellow for Physics 16, wrote the sourcebook for the class, which is filled with more than 40 limericks, including:

One morning while eating my Wheaties,

I felt the earth move ’neath my feeties,

The cause for alarm

Was a long lever-arm,

At the end of which grinned Archimedes!

Morin, who earned his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1996, says the limericks are designed to make the book more enjoyable to read and don’t represent any deep insights into physics (“they’re just a geeky thing I like to do”). He first began writing them five years ago when the American Physical Society held a physics limerick-writing contest, and he has used his sourcebook as an excuse to continue composing.

At the March slam, the shy poet-physicists divided into groups, each writing one line of a limerick before passing it off for the next group to compose the next line. This communal limericking resulted in mostly nonsense, but one poem survived the activity:

A physicist aptly named Bohr

Gave lectures that made people snohr.

They never could stomach

His models atomic

As no one knew what they were fohr.

But the apparently boring Bohr was not the only inspiration for the poetry; textbooks were also a popular source. “Griffiths was a particularly popular author,” observes SPS President Craig L. Hetherington ’03.

Though some SPS members characterized the poetry at the slam as “pretty lame,” it was a bona fide excuse to get their artistic juices flowing. The SPS officers, who hope to make the poetry slam an annual event, promise better food next time.