With apologies to William Blake Photon! Photon! Forming Flight, In the lab as dark as night. What nonlinear order Chi Could spring entangled Symmetry?
In what distant laser dyes Sparked thy subtle wave-like guise? What on resonance transpires? On what level lasing fires?
And what calcite, and what part? Could squeeze thy spin with such art? And when thy mode began to lock, What short pulse, and what short clock
What the Amplitude? What the Phase? Of this single-photon craze? What the particle? What dread thought In what paradox are we caught?
When the stars threw down their spears, That travelled for a million years, Did the correlations bunch? Just like Twiss and the other's hunch?
Photon! Photon! Forming Flight, In the lab as dark as night. What nonlinear order Chi Could spring entangled Symmetry?
—Krister Shalm 2010
This is the poem that I wrote for my PhD thesis. I have been meaning to post it for awhile now.