by Deborah BrownI say nothing about how fast the light travels or of Einstein's problem catching up with it, or of Ludwig Boltzmann, who killed himself when scientists mocked his belief in other dimensions. Today the strings of Boltzmann's theory have stories to tell, they pulsate to anyone's rhythm. I hold you in ten dimensions, wish you safe in all of them. I know space and time curl around strings that give rise to the gravity which holds us here, the way the notes of Mozart's Requiem scrolled on his last staves. The invisible strings in us spin themselves into specks of light, and two new forces one strong and one weak, draw us together. This is the complicated shape of our time together, our past and present woven into a fragment of the sky. It is an elegy to you.
