If particles only exist as waves,
precipitating out only when measured, seen,
till then just ghostly, nebulous, roughed-in…
If that’s the way the universe behaves,
then who’s to say the moons of Jupiter
existed before Galileo scoped
them out? Our simple world had coped,
pre-Hubbell, without needing to infer
a billion galaxies. Again, if things
newly observed are different than before,
then things that once were real are real no more,
especially nebulous, wave-form, with wings,
hence dragons, fairies, elves all now seem odd…
and angels, demons, giants, ghosts… and God.

*****

This sonnet was recently published in Bewildering Stories (thanks, Don Webb), and seems to have touched a chord with that issue’s theme of esse est percipi; so it leads off that week’s questions in the magazine:

In Robin Helweg-Larsen’s An Observation:George Berkeley’s philosophy of Idealism is based upon the principle: “To be is to be perceived.” How does the theory of Quantum Physics support the principle of perception? Or does it?The poem concludes by listing a number of supernatural beings whose reality is implicitly denied as long as they have not been perceived. How does “God” differ — by definition — from the others in the list?By whom or what must something be perceived in order to exist? And how does a perception take place?

Photo: “Nebulous in Blue” by Toby Keller / Burnblue is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.