FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA AND THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION

NEWTON

On Newton´s nose

the big apple falls,

meteorite of truths.

The last one hanging

from the Science tree.

Great Newton scratches

his Saxon nose.

There was a white moon

over the barbaric lace

of the beech trees.

QUESTION

Why was the apple

and not

the orange

or the  polyhedral

pomegranate?

Why was this pure fruit

so revealing,

this soft and

placid apple?

What admirable symbol

sleeps deep inside?

Adan, Paris and Newton

carry it in their souls

and they caress it but

they cannot glimpse it.

Great Federico García Lorca dedicated a bloody good poem to Isaac Newton. Above we have only the first and the last stanzas. Sir Isaac Newton was probably some kind of weird guy. After reading this poem, I like to picture him as a charismatic scientist full of magic and always surrounded by rosebays, rings, owls and all the typical stuff that critics call “Lorca´s universe”, which is by the way, a recurrent expression in this blog.
Some people say and I agree that God made the ancient Greeks so the teachers of the future could have a living. Similarly we can say that Lorca was made for the bullfighting and flamenco critics to have an appropriate vocabulary.
(I hope you like this poem better than the last I posted here)

THE GREY NOTEBOOK ( JOSEP PLA) AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

As all antirationalists do, Corominas makes nice , brilliant phrases. He says, for example, that the discovery of the hertzians waves may be caused mainly by the poetical intuition rather than by an effort of systematic observation. My brother gets angry.

It has already been said here that The Grey Notebook was a kind of blog with a very high literary quality. The brother of Pla´s we mentioned above was a chemist.

I daresay that perhaps it´s true that the scientific method is neither so methodic nor so scientific. Besides, it may be arguable its mandatory presence at the beginning of many Science school manuals.

SPANISH CONVERSATIONS (CELA) AND THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

In his book “Spanish Conversations”, Camilo José Cela interviews different well-known people from Art and Politics. In the interview to the musician Andrés Segovia, you can read, among other wits, the following:

• Do you love velocity?
• Relatively, I´m not really into velocity either. Furthermore, one more thing: the speed of light is wonderful. So, what do we have to make an effort for, if we won´t ever reach that speed?

First of all, I like the question. I think you can know a lot about a person according to his answer to that.

However, what I really love is the answer. I love its beginning with “relatively” and its ending with the knowledge of relativity that the musician shows. Because it´s true, a particle can´t exceed the speed of light.

In case that Chilindrón points it out to me, I must say that I know that once there was a piece of news in papers about the possibility to exceed the speed of light. But I only believe what I studied in text books, not what I read in papers.

FOAM OF THE DAZE (BORIS VIAN) AND THE FICTIOUS FORCES

“The floor of the lift swelled under their feet and with a big and soft spasm, it took them at their flat”

Boris Vian describes the feeling you have when a lift stops very well. Something similar happens, but at horizontal direction, when a bus starts and we are surprised standing without being grabbed. We notice how something pulls us backwards (or forward if the bus stops).
However, this “something” doesn´t exist, there´s no force which pulls us backwards. These forces are called fictitious forces (this is science fiction indeed)

Another very well- known fictitious force is the centrifugal one, which doesn´t exist either, like all the fictitious forces. They appear in order to apply the fundamental equation of Dynamics to the no inertial reference systems.
( An issue that is not clear for me when I read this quote by Boris Vian is if the lift was going up or down before stopping,because both of them produce a similar sensation) 

DNA (LUIS ALBERTO DE CUENCA) AND THE STRUCTURE OF DOUBLE HELIX OF ADN

DNA or ADN, it doesn´t matter

 in Spanish or in English, the point

is that I´m dying for your proteins,

for your amino acids, for everything

what you were once, when your parents

came back from dinner a bit tipsy

and, after pulling the chain,

they made a new one with your name,

with your curves and with your fantasies.

Give me a photo of your DNA,

ID card size, that I writhe

with wish for looking at it all the day

It´s a nice and funny poem, although it may have a too friendly tone, as a Borbón skipping the protocol, or as a song by Joaquín Sabina