P.A.M.
The poet’s eyes see a world
Of dancing shadows and reflections
Echoes and whispers bring nature to his ears
He conceives a universe of romantic perfection
His art is to bring this truth to paper
His pen makes that connection
“Beauty in truth, truth in beauty” (1)
Elegance vies with truth
In the physicist’s beautiful mind
He conceives the weak and strong forces of nature
The gravity and magnetism that bind
A world of strangeness, beauty and charm
Superstrings entwined
“It is more important to
have beauty in one’s equations than to fit the truth” (2)
Sadness lies behind those insightful eyes
A melancholy moulded in youth by a tyrant
That drove a brother to take his life
And kept caged this genius, this mind so vibrant
Imprisoned behind three initials: P. A. M.
Making the unknown known through brilliant science.
“In poetry it is the exact
opposite” (3)
His language was “beautiful
mathematics” (4)
His theories stunning and ethereal
Inapt that he should have been raised in the concrete city
of flying machines and Brunel
Belatedly acknowledged on a Westminster floor
And 20 years on, in his home town as well
His epitaph reads “Small
Worlds”. (5)
Small but beautiful worlds.
Paul Adrien Maurice
(P.A.M.) Dirac.
b Bristol 8th August 1902. d Tallahassee
20th October 1984
Quotes:
(1) Keats. Ode on a Grecian Urn
(2) Dirac.
(3) Dirac “In science one tries to tell people, in
such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew
before. In poetry it is the exact opposite”
(4) Dirac. “God used beautiful mathematics in
creating the world”
(5) Tribute to Dirac on statue outside @Bristol
