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A somewhat lyrical story of physics (Part III)

(continues from Part II)


A glowing hot body and its entropy, when tied tightly together,
composed an enigma, about the nature of matter.
As Marie, Pierre and Roentgen, discovered radioactivity anon,
Rutherford would design, an alpha-particle gun.
Charges as flesh and seeds of a melon, modeling material composition,
he verily shattered, by elegant demonstrations.
Foils of gold showed nuclear cores, quite positive and dense,
blanketed by material wispy, negative, to balance.
A bold, young, patent clerk, had also arrived by 19-Oh-five,
as he put forth, four ideas he had contrived.
In gendanken, he'd glimpse, visions unifying space-and-time,
by another he'd explain, the motion of a pollen grain.
His third established equivalence, between matter and energy,
while the fourth resurrected, light’s corpuscularity.
The latter of these allowed Bohr, to quantize an atomic theory,
so physics again could explain, matter's stability!
New tools in hand, ahead raced experiments, to test new theories,
repeatedly confirming, yet finding, subtle discrepancies.
Arcane symbols were mandatory, to make the invisible perceivable,
united too by a cry, "all observations must be explainable!"
Atomic signatures were plain revealed, through stardust, optically,
more precisely, in starlight, recorded spectroscopically.
Stellar temperatures or composition, were seen by incandescence,
in photons born and eaten by atoms, universally apparent.
The absorption and emission, of atomic spectra too were well tabulated, 
by matrix mechanics calculated, only if oddly formulated.
In singular curiosity gathered, great luminaries to plod as they hatched,
plans to unravel, the Old One's secrets, hitherto unmatched.
Questioning intrepidly: what, why, and how, stuff that makes up stuff,
would have to behave, when seen close enough?
From Copenhagen emerged ironclad, a formalism cast in mathematics, 
questioning objective reality, granted by old physics!
An equation which came to Schrodinger, that clarified what governs,
the smallest, any and all, of material interactions.


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