Comments on: How Glass Breaks: Four Theories

By: Sara

Sara — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 08:28:29 +0000

Ah, that’s neat, Dave. Like Rachel, I love the first stanza best, but the whole thing is pretty cool. Nice work!

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:15:35 +0000

Thanks for the comments. It’s gratifying to realize that I may have succeeded in making some fairly dry material come alive – and of course it’s always fun to see what people will respond to in something as strange as this. My personal favorite was the third stanza; the fourth was the most challenging to write because of the extreme stangeness of the material. It was easy to forget, when reading these papers, that they were actually talking about something breaking – it sounded so much more like a wedding than a divorce! But then it occurred to me that if we are to have any chance of conceptualizing things at the atomic level, we have to turn all our convential notions upside-down…

By: Brenda

Brenda — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 08:00:25 +0000

Whew… marriage in the 21st century- the fractal conceit, the wine glass at the Jewish wedding, brilliantly done. To a beautiful, slow shattering dance, “until the last
bonds fail & the atoms
dance irrevocably
apart.”

By: patry Francis

patry Francis — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:40:27 +0000

You’ve proved it. The world of science can yield some amazing poetry. So much hard truth is encapsulated in a term like “fractal self affinity”.

By: leslee

leslee — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 18:25:39 +0000

Yup, make that three of us! I think it left me looking for similar “returns” from the microscopic world in the other stanzas. There is a bit of that, I think, in the last stanza – the changing of partners, the bonds fail and dance irrevocably apart – so much for the wedding!

By: beth

beth — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:37:16 +0000

Terrific poem, Dave. Like Rachel, I especially loved the first stanza and its surprising concluding image of the bridegroom, bringing us suddenly into the picture.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 08:17:03 +0000

That’s lovely, Dave.

The first stanza is my favorite — I love both its opening lines and its closing lines.

By: kasturi

kasturi — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 03:12:30 +0000

impressive,…and beautiful

“under
an electron microscope, each region
shows the same kinds of features
at a finer & finer scale – a fractal
self-affinity.”

and

“the same pressure
responsible for the break
makes the gaps snap shut
immediately thereafter.
Let’s call them nanovoids,
these model wounds,
healing as perfectly as if
they had never been.”

worlds within worlds