Creation
(for Stephen Hawking)
A Quark is not the sort of thing
you sort of sit back and enjoy
like a shower of meteors
or an “I Love Lucy” marathon
late night on the classic cable channel!.
“Quark” is short for “Quick Spark” and,
so far as I can tell they are
the very smallest one of all
the sub-atomic particles;
about a million of them fit inside
the nucleus of an atom, so
if one should land upon your foot
or conk you on the coconut
there isn’t any likelihood
that it will leave much of a mark at all!.
The only way a quark is seen
is with one of them new-fangled
particle accelerator
thingies that they have out now
and, damn it, wouldn’t you just know,
I lost the owner’s manual to mine!.
As far as anyone can tell
the quark is indivisible
(with liberty and quarkiness
for all), that is, you can’t just go
into a greasy spoon and say,
“Hey Doris, I’m not very hungry,
how’s about just half a quark today”
Sorry, if you want a quark,
you have to get the whole damn quark
with a pickle and some chips!.
You want some coffee with that quark, or what!?
The other thing that’s interesting
about that little quark of ours
is the way it moves around!.
You see, the quark does not exist
until it starts to move, and when
it doesn’t move, it’s not there anymore!.
While our little quark exists
it journeys about a centimeter
(that is just about the width
of someone’s pinky fingernail)
and it meanders on its way
about three-fourths the speed of light;
it’s pretty tough to nail one down;
I’m not even sure what color they are!.
So, in our minds let’s back things up
a couple trillion years or so:
and there’s this thing that’s kind of like
a universe except it has
nothing in it but some little quarks,
some quick and sparky little sparks
of quick and quarky sparkiness!.
The quarks, they don’t know anything;
they don’t know the difference;
they might be the smallest things
but then, they are the biggest, too, for now!.
There are no bigger sub-atomic
particles to pick on them
or give them quarky-wedgies or
to take their quarky lunch money away!.
There are no planets, moons, or stars
or “I Love Lucy” marathons,
just sparky, quarky little sparks
of quarky little sparky quarkiness!
… and the earth was without form
and void and darkness was upon
the face of the deep!.
And God looked out at all the quarks,
buzzing and flitting around in the dark
and He snapped his fingers: “I’ve got an idea!”
and then He reached out with His mighty arms
and gathered all the quarks together,
squeezed them all into a bunch,
until they were the size of a star,
a planet, then a ping-pong ball;
He pushed and pushed till they became
a single geometric point!.
And then God looked around and said,
“How’s about a little light on the subject!.”
BANG!
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