Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare…
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was heard on occasion to say
That only the author of Euclid’s Elements
Had ever seen Beauty without habiliments.
One supposes she meant to imply that people who do maths
Have taken quite the best of all available paths
And that study of the other sciences might be eschewed
If one wished for a chance to see Beauty nude.
But I wonder what she’d have said had she lived to learn
About the physicists at CERN
Who have managed to catch the Higgs Boson
Without any clothes on?
Image: An example of simulated data modeled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Following a collision of two protons, a Higgs boson is produced which decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue. This image, produced by Lucas Taylor for CERN, was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license.
Thanks to Hélène Wilkinson, who in a manner of speaking put me up to it.
And thanks, as always, to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Bag of Anything 
Would she have said, “Well, stow it!
I know I’m a well-respected poet,
But naked particle physics, let alone astronomy,
I will only contemplate without a stitch on me”?
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Yes! Let a hundred doggerels bloom!
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I find it’s really hard, and goes against the grain, composing lines that don’t scan! I won’t do that again.
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I find it’s much neater to concentrate on rhyme, and forget about the meter. Saves time.
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Love your take-down of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was perhaps the first person in our pantheon of celebrity who was famous for being famous (though she did write some good lines here and there)
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I remember being impressed when I learned she had added the “St. Vincent” herself; I thought it showed admirable chutzpah. But I rather wish I hadn’t read her biography…
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I’d follow your blog but can’t find anywhere to sign on. I guess you’ll just have to go on liking my blog and I will like yours back.
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Oh wait, it seems I am already following you. How perspicacious of me!
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