A F Harrold

The Scientists' Party Poem.

Well, Einstein said he’d come to my party
and Faraday planned to 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
Marie Curie went and bought a new gown.

Mendeleyev and Mendel, Edison and Tesla,
Lavoisier, Cassini and Blaise Pascal,
Pythagoras and Foucault, Dawkins and Doppler,
Euclid, Darwin and Werner van Braun, all confirmed they were coming.

Copernicus said he’d like to have a boogie
Watson and Crick affirmed en masse
Ptolemy declared all the plans groovy
Galileo said he couldn’t ‘cause he had a touch of gas

Mandelbrot and Fermat, Fermi and Hawking,
Hippocrates, Bacon, Harvey and La Place,
Cavendish and Kepler, Babbage and Turing,
Fibanacci, Ampère and Van de Graf, all said they’d love to come.

I had RSVPs from Richard Feynman,
Volta, Kelvin, Archimedes and Nobel.
Only Heisenberg was caught prevaricating,
he claimed to be uncertain on principle.

Anyway, the evening arrived about a week later,
I tidied up the flat, put some Twiglets in a bowl,
dimmed the lights a bit, put on party music,
and waited to see what events would evolve.

The doorbell rang and Ben Franklin was standing
out in the garden, slightly damp in the rain.
Pavlov had brought along a mutilated dog
but he’d also brought dessert so I didn’t complain.

And so the flat filled up with the great and the good
but then a shout and a shove made the start of a fight.
Freud was the first to find himself ejected
when Popper pointed out that he was talking utter shite.

Then Max Planck left, he’d said he’d only stay a little,
and then Neils Bohr started to do just that
at this point the party seemed to be slipping
but Schrödinger then arrived with Schrödinger’s Yak.

And so the party perked up as we all took turns
to dance with Marie Curie and to open up the box
and to be an observer of a quantum state
on an animal not unrelated to an ox.

[it was all quite nice ‘cause you’d open up the lid
and the Yak, from inside, would give a little wave.
Schrödinger, meanwhile, was getting quite shloshed
on Aristotle’s ouzo, which we all thought brave.]

So time drew on and the evening grew late
and nothing much happened that needs to be said
some of them went home and some them collapsed
and several I shan’t name all ended up in bed.

Mendeleyev and Mendel, Edison and Tesla,
Lavoisier, Cassini and Blaise Pascal,
Pythagoras and Foucault, Dawkins and Doppler,
Euclid, Darwin and Werner van Braun,
Mandelbrot and Fermat, Fermi and Hawking,
Hippocrates, Bacon, Harvey and La Place,
Cavendish and Kepler, Babbage and Turing,
Fibanacci, Ampère and Van de Graf,
Leibniz and Couper, Carver and Bellamy,
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Patrick Moore,
Dyson and Rutherford, Ångstrom and Fleming,
Buckminster Fuller and Louis Pasteur,
Montgolfier and Maxwell, Herschel, Marconi,
Logie Baird, Booboo and Stephen Jay Gould,
Fraunhoffer, Descartes, Hook and Smith,
Vorderman, Zarkov and Johnny Ball
all wrote me very nice thank you letters to say what a lovely party it had been and they hoped that one day we could do it all again.