Alan Olee Book Report

https://str.llnl.gov/June10/evans.html

At 1.4 million atmospheres
xenon, a gas, goes metallic.
Between squeezed single-bevel
diamond anvils jagged bits
of graphite shot with a YAG
laser form spherules. No one
has seen liquid carbon. Try
to imagine that dense world
between ungiving diamonds
as the pressure mounts, and
the latticework of a salt
gives, nucleating at defects
a shift to a tighter order.
Try to see graphite boil. Try
to imagine a hand, in a press,
in a cellar in Buenos Aires,
a low-tech press, easily
turned by one hand, easily
cracking a finger in another
man’s hand, the jagged bone
coming through, to be crushed
again. No. Go back up, up
like the deep diver with
a severed line, up, quickly,
to the orderly world of ruby
and hydrogen at 2.5 megabar,
the hydrogen coloring near
metallization, but you hear
the scream in the cellar, don’t
you, and the diver rises too fast.

Roald Hoffmann
Chemist and Poet
Winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/pictures-note-these-images-may-be-downloaded

From “Verse & Universe, Poems About Science and Mathematics”  Edited by Kurt Brown