The work of others

Colm Scully

Albert Einstein,
at his patent office desk,
studying the work of George Fitzgerald
scrunching the apparatus,
to unriddle the work of Michelson and Morley
pouring a bed of mercury
in a dormitory basement in Cleveland, Ohio,
wave crests insistently
realigning.

The Science

I have always been fascinated by the scientific discoveries that have changed our world. I grew up in an education system that lauded inspirational genius, people magicking ideas out of their heads. The cult of personality transposed onto the history of science. It was only through experience that I realised all progress is incremental, derivative. Sure, Einstein was a genius, but they never told us that he based his Special Theory of Relativity on the work of the little remembered Irish scientist George Fitzgerald’s hypothesis on length contraction, who was responding to Michelson and Morley’s famous null-experiment (using an interferometer on a sandstone slab, lying in a cauldron of mercury in their basement lab in Cleveland, Ohio) where they failed to determine the existence of the much hailed aether. On and on it goes; the work of others is what got us here.

This poem fits in with the theme of waves because, in their experiment, Michelson and Morley cast two light beams perpendicular to each other, measuring the interference of the waves once they met again. It was accepted that light travelled as a wave, but science at the time believed that it needed a medium (the aether) to travel in, as sound waves need the atmosphere. Measuring the fringe drift of two light waves as they remet would be their way of refining the properties of the aether. Much later, Einstein used gravitational waves in his work on the nature of gravity. All this progressive work owed a debt to Christiaan Huygens, who first propounded the wave theory of light in the 17th century. Each scientist took something from those who went before. This unending continuity is what makes the scientific project humankind's most exciting endeavour. 

The Poet

Colm Scully is a poet and poetry film maker from Cork, Ireland. Recently retired as a Chemical Engineer he now spends his time trying to conjure up the poetic effect in film. His work has been shown at many festivals and he was awarded the Deanna Tulley Multimedia Prize 2024 by The Slipper Elm Magazine Ohio and the Cúirt New Writing Prize in 2014. He teaches poetry film and his second collection, Neanderthal Boy, is due out in September 2025 from Wordsonthestreet Books. Learn more at colmscully.com

Next poem: Two-faced waves by Martha Pollard