When Mortals Work On Cosmic Time Poem by gershon hepner

When mortals work on cosmic time
they do it first in prose, then rhyme
becomes the vehicle the greatest
employ, but now the very latest
technique that mortals use to measure
the moments that give cosmic pleasure
to theologians and philos-
ophers who’re never at a loss
for words which rarely make much sense
is a collider that’s immense,
and should, by smashing particles,
produce scientific articles
that help explain the universe
far better than men do in verse,
and of course in prose, however
much they try, however clever.

In Xunantunich, we are told,
when men who couldn’t write were bold
enough to build their sacred Mayan
pyramids while they were high on
peyote or maybe tequila,
devout as Jews before ne’ilah,
some thought that anyone who’d climb
the summit would find sacred time,
but native scholars were more skeptic,
suspicious, cautious and proleptic
the doubts they shared in Mayan squadrons
about colliders built for hadrons
that will not solve the problems men
address whenever they ask “When
will we find sacred time’s true path? ”
The answer will not come from math,
or any system of belief
in sacred writing that debrief
but do not help to clarify
the fundamental question, “Why? ”
just as it hasn’t come from prose
or poetry. We must suppose
there is no way that we will find
its path except within our mind.

Inspired by an article by James Glanz about the failure of the Large Hadron Collider (“When Mortals Work on Cosmic Time, ” NYT, August 9,2009) :
Our guide, an acerbic Belizean named Albert, walked us up a hill, around a bend in the path and toward the weathered stone ziggurat and weedy surrounding structures that rose out of the jungle like a real estate development gone bad. It was Xunantunich, the sacred Mayan pyramid carefully aligned with the sun, moon and stars and built layer upon layer over hundreds of years by successive generations until something went wrong — nobody knows exactly what — and the inhabitants simply left. I am not sure what most visitors think when they behold that crumbling majesty and mystery. As a former physicist, I thought of the Large Hadron Collider, another grandiose structure with cosmic aspirations and earthbound problems that could thwart its ambitions. The collider, a giant machine outside Geneva that is hunting for subatomic particles that could help explain the origin of the universe, was already idle and behind schedule during the recent visit to Belize. And last week, the laboratory where the accelerator is located announced that when it finally starts smashing particles together this winter, it will run at only half power because of a disastrous electrical short that caused extensive damage and revealed problems with the experiment itself.
On the hill in Belize, we were sweating from the climb and distracted by Albert, who was squinting with his one good eye and poking a stick into a tarantula’s hole to entertain a family from Oklahoma. But standing before the ruin, I had at least a hint of the thought that gripped me with full force last week: In Xunantunich and now again in Switzerland, the vast reaches of cosmic time and space have a way of humbling the puny efforts and resources of mortals who try to figure out the universe. It may have been the local rum punches, but to me the similarities between the two projects were clear-cut. The collider is a gargantuan structure at the European Center for Nuclear Research, called CERN, that scientists have built over generations to help them connect the smallest and largest structures in the universe, and perhaps make sense of why the cosmos is so hospitable to life. Sans particles, Xunantunich was designed to do more or less the same thing in the Central American hills. Instead of quarks and leptons, the friezes ringing the pyramid depict the gods of heaven, earth and the underworld, and humanity’s place among them. The stone structures themselves were laid out according to careful astronomical observations to help priests, rulers and common folk alike organize their lives and accurately mark the passing of time. And like Xunantunich, the collider these days is silent, if not abandoned. After $9 billion and 15 years in just the latest phase of CERN’s life, the collider — a multinational collaboration that includes the United States — has been idled by an electrical short involving its colossal magnets, leading some frustrated scientists to ask whether it will ever fulfill the dreams, and justify the money, that have been invested in it…
Even the Large Hadron Collider has not been around as long as Xunantunich was before the Mayas mysteriously left it behind. The central pyramid, nicknamed El Castillo, was built like a birthday cake in three or four phases over roughly 300 years, starting sometime between A.D.500 and 600, said Richard M. Leventhal, a professor of anthropology and director of the Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He has led many archeological digs at Xunantunich, which is located in the hills of western Belize near the border with Guatemala. Scientists have variously proposed that earthquakes, hurricanes, drought, malaria and yellow fever led the Mayas to abandon Xunantunich. But Dr. Leventhal said he believed such explanations were beside the point. What happens first, he says, is that a worldview or belief system underpinning a culture begins to weaken. Only then can some unfortunate event like a natural disaster, or an electrical short, threaten the whole system. “All of these multigenerational projects are based upon a strong and ongoing belief system in how the world works, ” Dr. Leventhal said. As long as that system stays intact, he said, “construction continues and is slightly modified within each generation to fit the current time.” If not, all bets are off.


8/10/09