Because of the Pauli Particle Principle,
things are out of control and tea gets steeped
by the cup not the pot.
Pauli was not to blame--
he was only the messenger.
Like Einstein before him: a mere
messenger for what already was.
Things have always
been exactly what they are for as long as
this universe has been.
Fermi only gave a name to what had
already been. Bose only gave a name
(by mistake) to what had already been.
Awareness, says de Mello, goes
back to before things have names, when
things just are without all our judgments
and superior egos in the way.
The bird still flies even if you do not know it
is a bird. The leaf still flutters
even if you do not know tree, wind, leaf,
the changing season. The boson still piles
up even if you do not know it exists.
The world still has an orbit even if it feels
like you are on solid ground tethered to
God Himself.
It took a while
for the universe to cool enough
to produce life and even longer
for that life to get intelligent enough
to conceive of mathematical formulas
and bored enough at the patent office
to determine that energy equals
mass times the speed of light
squared. But, really, now.
Einstein did not discover anything new;
he only uncovered what was always there
and already true. Einstein uncloaked relativity.
Maybe Einstein got lucky; he
got to boldly go where no one had
ever gone before--except.
Except maybe it was really just a matter of his fermions
being in the right place at the right time to get
published. Maybe there'd been someone years
earlier who figured the same thing out but
couldn't get a book deal or maybe the village drinking well
was not the best place to expound on a scientific theorem.
The students just weren't ready yet.
But we are talking tea here, not
publishing or women carrying water jugs or
scientists or teachers appearing nor are we talking
space, the final frontier,
and because of the Pauli Particle Principle,
Bach and his friends will sit quietly caught in time
on a silvery plastic disk humming, electrons buzzing
around the nucleons non-stop, Bach's own fermions long
ago transformed into something else but his bosons of
music piling up in waves and making us cry,
and Pauli will keep us all in our separate corners of existence
until your fermions make their
way through the bosons of space-time
and ring the doorbell just in time for tea and a movie.
(edited version; original poem written February 2010)
