The Science Poem
A F Harrold
Um, this next poem is, is one I wrote for a, er, a science festival I was en-, encouraged to er, write a poem on a scientific theme, and, and after, after realising that none of my training had been in science at all and I know very little about the er, the subject I decided to do some research, er that seemed like a good idea and this is the poem that arose from that research.
I think it was Albert Einstein who first said that he would come to my party
Then Michael Faraday said that he'd be there too
C.P. Snow at once assented
Lovelock said he'd see what he could do
Newton said he was definitely coming
Hubble's never yet turned a party down
J.P. Joule was becoming excited
And Marie Curie went and bought a new gown
Mendeleev and Mendel, Edison and Tesla
Lavoisier, Cassini and Blaise Pascal
Pythagoras and Foucault, Dawkins, Doppler
Euclid, Darwin and Werner von Braun
All said they were going to come to my party
Which is very kind of them
Copernicus said he really liked to have a boogie
Watson and Crick affirmed en masse
Ptolemy declared all the plans groovy
Galileo said he couldn't, 'cos he had a touch of gas
Mandelbrot and Fermat, Fermi, Hawking
Hippocrates, Bacon, Harvey and Laplace
Cavendish and Kepler, Babbage and Turing
Fibonacci, Ampere and Van der Graaff
All said they were delighted to be invited to my party
And they'd come as well which was very kind of them
Had RSVPs as well from Richard Feynman
Kelvin, Volta, Archimedes and Nobel
Only Heisenberg was caught prevaricating
He claimed to be uncertain on principle
About a week later the evening arrived
Ben Franklin showed up first, slightly damp from the rain
Then Pavlov walked in with a mutilated dog
But he'd also brought dessert so we didn't complain
Then the flat filled up with the great and the good
And a shout and a shove made the start of a fight
Freud was the first to find himself ejected
When Karl Popper pointed out he was talking utter shite
Then Max Planck left - he said he'd only stay a little while
And then Neil Bohr started, well, to do just that
And right then it's sure that the party started slipping
And then Schroedinger arrived, with Schroedinger's yak
And then the party perked up and we all took turns
To dance with Marie Curie and to open up his box
And be an observer of quantum state
On an animal not unrelated to an ox
It was all quite nice 'cos you'd open up the lid
And the yak from inside would give a little wave
Schroedinger meanwhile was getting quite schloshed
On Aristotle's ouzo which we all thought brave
Time drew on and evening grew late
And nothing else happened that needs to be said
Some of them went home and some of them collapsed
And several I shan't name all ended up in bed
Mendeleev and Mendel, Edison and Tesla
Lavoisier, Cassini, Blaise Pascal
Pythagoras and Foucault, Dawkins, Doppler
Euclid, Darwin and Werner von Braun
Mandelbrot, Fermat, Fermi, Hawking
Hippocrates, Bacon, Harvey and Laplace
Cavendish and Kepler, Babbage and Turing
Fibonacci, Ampere, Van der Graaff
Leibniz, Couper, Carver, Bellamy
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Patrick Moore
Dyson, Rutherford, Angstrom, Fleming
Buckminster Fuller, Louis Pasteur
Montgolfier, Maxwell, Herschel, Marconi
Logie Baird, Bubu, Stephen Jay Gould
Fraunhofer, Decartes, Hooke and Avogadro
Vordeman, Professor Zarkov and Johnny Ball
All sent me really nice thank you letters to say what a lovely party it had been
But why oh why oh why, Ashley, does this poem not have a punchline?