After Kenneth Koch

Thank you for inviting me here to talk about quantum mechanics but it's not a subject I know a great deal about so what I thought I'd do is maybe read some poetry or talk on those things I do know a little about such as the paintings of René Magritte or the early recordings of Ray Charles or how plants synthesize sunlight & then I thought I'd maybe play a little jazz to give some ambience to the ampitheatre & then segue in Bach & overdub it with a recording of Gödel talking about mathematical progressions & then I thought you could all get up & dance & I'll start projecting your composite changing energy patterns on the back wall & I'll make a cup of coffee in the microwave & read a few more poems & then overlay your dance with a horizontal hologram of Schrödinger's equation which broken up would appear asemic & then I'd bring out a dart-throwing machine that was programmed so that any throw had a 5% chance of hitting the bulls-eye & a 95% chance of hitting the outer ring but no other place & then I'd get it to throw 100 darts & then project the end image so that you could all see each dart & how together they behave like particles but you could also see the small cluster in the centre of the board surrounded by a large ring made up of the majority of the darts & the whole pattern is the accumulation of the individual darts based on the probabilities of where each dart would have landed & shows the wavelike behaviour of the darts & then I'd say well I guess that means that the overlaying ellipses of the iconic atom are out of date & the Atomic Energy Commission had better change its logo & then I'd stand there silent for a moment & say that you all know where I am up here on the stage & that's classical physics but in reality the particles of my body keep moving so that you only get an approximate idea of where I'd be & have to work out the probabilities of how they'd move to know exactly where I am & that's quantum mechanics or a very rough approximation of it then I'd do another little dance which I've called the wave-particle duality of light & matter & you could all go home knowing a little bit about the subject I was invited hear tonight to talk about & essentially a whole lot more than I do.