Wednesday 4 October 2017

LIGO/VIRGO by Sheila Ash

Ripples in the fabric of space and time ripple in the fabric of space and time….
Where two black holes merge,
there, undulate and warp and curve violently play,
folding and bending the event horizon
until gravitational waves
burst forth.
In cruciform oscillation
they travel the universe unimpeded
at the speed of light.

Echoes of a violent past
they pass the Earth unseen, unfelt,
like laps upon a seashore on a calm day.
Our existence unaffected
until the winds rev them up to lash our shores,
erode our coastlines,
reshape our lands,
enforced restructuring of lives.

Einstein predicted
these faint echoes of past violence
now seen by interferometers
as wiggles in a laser beam,
their reverberations signalling
the seismic shift
in our understanding of the universe
that ripples through the fabric of space and time

© Sheila Ash, 2017

4th October 2017 on the announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2017/press.html )

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