What’s the Problem?
proballein:
“the thing thrown
forward”
Reading biographies of game theorist John Nash;
prankster & bongo playing physicist Richard Feynman;
& Manhattan Project director Joel Oppenheimer: I am
taunted by how-it-is physics & math people get to carry
PROBLEMS with them over long periods of time, years
inside their heads: koans, conundrums, perplexities,
paradoxes, tantalizing tango tangles, thorns in the flesh,
peas under mattresses: Atlases un-shrugged,
Sisyphi un-hugged.
Their Briar Patch
And they get to talk it over with each other: colleagues,
fellow travelers, busy bodies in common, cerebral gaggers
coughing up some same kind of theoretical hair ball, some
proballein
got them in its spell: solution begging ab-solution, soaking
wet & waiting for the sunrise—some elegant reduction
of reductions of reductions in a nutshell.
Lucky ones: the kind who see snake biting tails on a London
trolley & imagine benzene rings or sink in a warm tub &
recognize the displacement necessary to assess a king’s
gold crown.
Eureka-ists, Holy Smokes
& Ooo my Gawd-ists
I would say it elegant if I knew how. On my mind for years
but can’t pose the problem that poses the problem that pose
the problems so I can brood & it can ripen and a ha! in the
middle of night or somecar radio song: I get it! & run naked
thru the streets of Syracuse.
fellow travelers, busy bodies in common, cerebral gaggers
coughing up some same kind of theoretical hair ball, some
proballein
got them in its spell: solution begging ab-solution, soaking
wet & waiting for the sunrise—some elegant reduction
of reductions of reductions in a nutshell.
Lucky ones: the kind who see snake biting tails on a London
trolley & imagine benzene rings or sink in a warm tub &
recognize the displacement necessary to assess a king’s
gold crown.
Eureka-ists, Holy Smokes
& Ooo my Gawd-ists
I would say it elegant if I knew how. On my mind for years
but can’t pose the problem that poses the problem that pose
the problems so I can brood & it can ripen and a ha! in the
middle of night or somecar radio song: I get it! & run naked
thru the streets of Syracuse.
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