December 3, 2019

College student solves 100-year-old physics problem *

Sometimes the answer is not under your nose but someone else’s,
someone with fewer losses behind them, someone with less to lose, 
who doesn’t look at the glass as either half-this or half-that but 
a surface with its own topography and tension, separate from what 
surrounds it. Which is why the entirety of a century had to elapse 
before a young engineer took his swipe at a solution. This
is how sluggish and elusive time can be, and full of riddles
not yours to untangle. So why not let the mystery be what it is, until
it isn’t. Savor the echo of your voice rumbling through a canyon where, away 
from view, a bubble of air is rising, imperceptibly, out of the heaviest stone.

*The title of this poem is the headline from this news story.