My sonnet in which Isaac Newton deduces his way towards string theory. I began it in the orchard at Woolsthorpe, Northamptonshire, under his apple tree. NEWTON AT WOOLSTHORPE Light penetrates a knot-hole in a shutter; an apple falls. The universe’s rules apply no less to life’s accustomed clutter than to its galaxies and molecules, and even the most unassuming shack supplies in everyday domestic life its own laboratory, the bric-à-brac of physics: pitcher, mirror, candle, knife. And yet it takes a Newton to deduce that implication from the thing itself, from any piece of junk its nobler use, as yet unnoticed on the kitchen shelf: as solipsistic as a pinchbeck ring of alchemists, a knotted loop of string… [from Gregory Woods, An Ordinary Dog (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011)]
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 14:11:21 +0000
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