Symphony

Amy Bilton

All
you Cs’s
weightlifting
electrons, together
you shine like gold, pool
like mercury, but in your small dance
troupes you keep us in
time with the beat.
You shiver,
lost lamb,
in icy
wilderness,
and wires probe
and count your bleats.
You’re a bridge onto which
we pile, stamping to make you swing.
Scientists as opera singers,
trying to copy your
concerto in every
iPhone, PC,
bomb
bound
for Kyiv, constellation
of clock strikes on New Year’s Eve.
You are commodity—stock markets rise and
fall by your hand, like the jagged
hems of torn skirts; the
worth of girls traced
in the lines
of your
face. But,
like seasons and sun,
even you can be replaced.
Billions will step aside for trillions.
Lasers will overtake microwaves. We will find
new ways to pull apart days.
And then, we’ll be
in the age
of strontium.

The Science

The second, symbol s, is the International System of Units (SI) unit of time. It is defined “by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s–1” (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures). In practice, this measurement is made using atomic clocks. Within atomic clocks, electromagnetic waves are used to excite atoms, causing them to transition between energy states. The wave frequency associated with this transition is specific to the atom being used. Caesium atomic clocks are tuned to a frequency of around 9 billion wave cycles per second (hertz, Hz), which is within the microwave range. It is this frequency that defines the duration of a second in timing systems around the world, including in GPS, telecommunications, financial markets and many more applications. Optical clocks—which use lasers instead of microwaves, and atoms with higher transition frequencies, such as strontium—are poised to be our next timekeepers. They measure time at the level of trillions of wave cycles per second. This precision could lead to improvements in applications such as global satellite navigation systems and explorations of fundamental physics, which rely on extremely accurate measurements.

The Poet

Amy Bilton is a business engagement professional in data science, who lives near Hull, in the UK. In 2022, she completed a Master of Arts in English from the University of Hull, focusing her studies on creative writing. Her dissertation was a science poetry collection, called t, on the nature of time. Before doing her Masters, Amy lived and worked abroad in Switzerland at CERN—home of the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC). She has also written a full-length musical that was workshopped in London in 2017.

Next poem: The Day the Universe Died by Dagne Forrest