I was listening to Ira Flato's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on Friday, February 18 because he was featuring A. Einstein's miracle year, and I had made a promise to myself that I would not avoid physics in my poetry to avoid the risk of being misunderstood and continue to be associated with science instead of literature (or whatever poetry is supposed to be). Well I guess the intro to the show put me in my place, the opening sigh was a report on a Harvard University class of 25 students that included only one (1) that could correctly explain why it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Maybe that says something about Harvard students in particular, but more likely something about the risk of a science allusion in a poem in general. My opinion is that if Greek mythology is fair, why not it's 21st century equivalent?

In any case, I was in the middle of reading John Barrow’s book, Constants of Nature, and had written the following poem about cosmology and how a physicist like Brian Green and a philosopher like Ken Wilber might take a differing views of a TOE:

Man on a Mission
or, . . . it only sounds like Kosmos


John Barrow used Fred Hoyle
as his cosmological foil.

Took the gas from the ". . . Cloud"
and redefined life as less endowed.

Smaller than a quantum blip
for safe passage on Noah’s ship.

Sailing off to live forever
on the Final Anthropic space endeavor.

Not human life as we know it,
but what the cosmos will permit.

It falls just short of a superstring
umM . . . Theory of Everything.

So despite the risks, I share it anyway, because how humans observe the universe seems important, somehow, even for an idle thinker on a bicycle.