Sad Underground Scientists
"We must pity the student in his deep dark hole
Whose thesis depends on that one monopole."
These words come from Glashow ;
we know they are true
For he's been to Stockholm, unlike me and you.
Who is this legion, so dirty and weary?
Sad underground scientists, unfit to do theory.
We lack the requisite imagination,
And staring at paper gives no inspiration.
We tend to start giggling when somebody mentions
Field theories in more than four space-time dimensions.
We direct electrons in our calorimetry
Invoking Ohm's law, not broken gauge symmetry.
Why won't the creative muse venture near us?
She works double time in the dream life of theorists.
For every particle so far discovered,
A dozen more lurk in the preprints from Harvard.
Theorists, twice lucky with charm and then Z's,
Now conjure up new fields whenever they please.
Higgs bosons and tops; monopoles, neutralinos;
Plus axions, sleptons, squarks and photinos --
By seminar speakers are such names thrown at us,
Of things seen on paper, not in apparatus.
The theorists get nervous when we insist
On seeing whose particles really exist
In massive detectors we'll build underground --
Aesthetics could suffer if theirs is not found.
So gladly we march to mines, tunnels or seas:
New physics or not, we get PhD's --
Condensed to a preprint we'll mail to our mothers
Of one page of physics (two pages of authors).
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