By Philip Quirke
Though he was a genius...
Einstein doctored his 1915 equations:
to deny what they were telling him:
that ‘it all’ had a beginning, that it ALL,
space, time, matter, was once not.
And that the place of this beginning
was close at hand...and must be so ...
if you wind back time to the singularity,
draw matter to its point of origin.
Lemaitre showed him, and Einstein accepted
the accuracy of his first intuition.
What pressed in on his imagination
went beyond his physics and maths.
He was already fired by this cosmos,
by the ‘why?’ and the ‘wherefore?’
of the vastness and wonder before his eyes,
knowledge which has expanded in our time
with data from telescopes Hubble and Webb
interpreted by astro-physicists,
informing us of two trillion galaxies
each with their billions of stars,
and the emergence of all that is
some 13.8 billion years ago.
Mind-expanding information, provocative wisdom:
must I not change my life?