Four Equations and the Ribbon (James Clerk Maxwell)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You unified
electricity and magnetism
with four equations
that fit on a napkin
and the napkin
was the most important surface
in nineteenth-century physics
because what was written on it
said that light —
all light,
the light
the visual cortex uses
to build every image
the species has ever seen —
is an electromagnetic wave
traveling at a speed
you calculated from bench measurements
in a Scottish laboratory
that smelled like
wound wire
and the warm graphite
of a pencil
doing work
no pencil
had been asked to do before

[Verse 2]
You predicted radio waves
twenty years
before anyone detected them —
the equations
said they existed
and the equations
did not require
anyone to believe them
in order to be correct
The temporal lobe
that assembled the prediction
was working
in a frequency
the species
would not build
the instruments to hear
until you were dead
which is either
tragedy
or the most flattering
possible review
of your mathematics:
the proof
arrived faster
than the audience

[Chorus]
The tartan ribbon —
1861 —
you asked a photographer
to take three pictures
of the same ribbon
through three colored filters:
red, green, blue —
then you projected them
together
and the ribbon
appeared in color
on a wall
in a London lecture hall
and for the first time
in the history of images
a machine
had reproduced
what the occipital cortex
does every waking moment
without effort
or gratitude:
assemble a world in color
from separate channels
of light
arriving at the same surface
at the same time
and agreeing
to become a picture

[Verse 3]
You also explained
Saturn's rings —
proved they could not
be solid,
proved they were
a parliament of particles
each one
in its own orbit
negotiating gravity
the way the anterior cingulate
negotiates competing demands:
by assigning priority
and letting
the lower-priority items
drift
until their orbit
either stabilizes
or doesn't
You solved Saturn
as a side project
which is the kind of sentence
that only applies
to three or four people
in the history
of the species

[Outro]
You died at forty-eight —
stomach cancer —
the same age as your mother
from the same disease
in the same county
and the coincidence
tasted like something
the equations
could not have predicted
because the equations
were built
to describe fields
and waves
and the behavior
of light
across distance
and they did not cover
the behavior
of a body
that repeated
its mother's schedule
without being asked
Einstein kept your portrait
on his study wall
which is the only peer review
that matters
when the peer
is the only person
who understood
what you started