Solvay 1927

It was just a few years after The Waste Land,
Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
And The Rite of Spring – not to mention World War I,
Automobiles and airplanes, atoms and the demise of the ether,
Relativity, quantum mechanics and the first inklings of the big bang.
It seemed as though the future had just started and was going to go on forever,
And that they were there to find it out: Einstein and Bohr, Dirac and Heisenberg,
De Broglie, Schrödinger, Born and all the other physicists that excited me
As I was reading those novels and poems and wondering what was coming next.
Nothing is too strong – after all, the universe is even vaster and harder to understand
Than they’d imagined – but that sense of something on the verge of coming true
And of heroes waiting in the wings to tell you what it was seems quaint now,
As though tomorrow turned into today and heaven suddenly settled back to earth.
What happened to that feeling that the universe was suddenly something new,
And the errors of the past were simply that – mistakes to be corrected
...