The Adventures of Dr. Quantum. By JBP.

Dr Quantum went too far,
Inventing particles so abstract and bizarre
His Nobel Prize caused comment in the bar.

His lecture ends, and none too soon.
Dr Quantum draws a pale balloon
And blows it till it bursts: 'Look, there's the moon!"

They lock poor Quantum in the loony bin.
He pricks on toilet paper with a pin:
"The universe is holes where light gets in."

The warden enters. Quantum isn't there.
A burning pencil dances in the air:
"Behold the absence which is everywhere."

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At the First, and necessarily the Last, Intrer-Disciplinary Congress, held in Ulan Bator at an unspecified date, a Theologian named Lars Porsena, Professor of Comparative Implication at Lohengrin University, seized the maverick physicist, Dr Quantum, by an available protuberance and shook him to and fro.

"You unmitigated scounder," he bellowed, "What do you mean by drivelling incessantly on about Absence and Nothing? Everything is Something or it wouldn't be here, and neither would you! And if it isn't here, where is it? And what about God, the source of all things, eh. You heathen boundrel? Where IS God? Answer me at once, immediately and without delay, or by Jings I'll force you forth into the depressing drizzle! Do you hear me, you iniquitous outrage?"

As soon as Quantum had regained possession of his protuberance and his teeth had stopped rattling like bones in a box, he replied soberly, as befits a scholar of dubious repute:

"Your attack is well-merited, dull sage, and you shall know the results of my experimental postulations herewith. They are as follows: The mystery-essence in Nature, were it to be found, would reside not in Order but in Randomness. This means, of course, despite your ungentlemanly threat to nearby protuberances, that it is the Indefinable which makes freedom possible, and the Improbability or No-thing known as God will always have another card up its invisible and possibly nonexistent sleeve no matter what immaterial discoveries are theoretically made. So let us therefore rejoice, like leaves on a lamp-post."
At that point he departed suddenly, like a Portuguese lizard.

"Aargh! Gack!" cried the Professor as he limped away in search of certainty and a cup of tea..

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© Winamop & JBP 2004

Read old page 94s here.

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