Letter to the Head of Faculty
It was cuts in funding,
That prompted the idea,
The lack of aircon too,
And no one was hurt,
I am glad to say,
Thanks to emergency service rescue.
'Twas the dazzling, hot sun,
Eight minutes away,
Roasting us in office and lab,
That caused the fire,
On that hot summer's day,
And destroyed the building so drab.
As we melted and suffered,
As we fanned and we drank,
As we sought any way to stay cool,
We hit on a thought,
An inspirational idea,
For chilling the Applied Physics School.
So given, as you know,
Our work on high physics,
Particles, accelerators and such,
We wondered, perhaps,
If cooling could be achieved,
Without it costing too much.
With the best brains in the world,
Well, the best in our field,
We sat down to set out our goal,
Using materials to hand,
We worked out a plan:
To build a small, and stable, wormhole.
When this was achieved,
The professors agreed,
(Though aware of regulation misrule)
Ours was a solution,
To the sticky situation,
That in all senses was very cool.
We decided on dimensions,
To cool our hot rooms,
Set up a complex heat exchange,
Sent out our hot air,
Into space to get cool,
Though to the layman the idea is strange.
So hitting the switch,
Calibrating the beam,
We followed our equations to the letter,
We pumped in the air
And returned it just there,
So cold, so chilled...so much better.
But the flaw in our plan
Which we hadn't foreseen,
Though now it's as clear as day,
Was that we didn't think
About the other side,
About the heat that was going away.
With a vast universe,
And an infinity of time,
We assumed a diffusion over miles,
But in fact our wormhole,
Ended a metre or so,
Inside our old cabinet of files.
And not over an aeon,
Not even a day,
But, in fact, from what we now reckon,
Was that all of the heat
From a whole day at least
Was delivered in point five of a second.
And it would appear to us now,
Though we should have then guessed,
So many of us oh-so-bright,
That such a concentration of heat
Delivered so fast
Would cause the paperwork to ignite.
The explosion was large,
Impressive you might say,
Years of paperwork instantly dissolved.
But the upside of this,
I'm sure you'll agree,
Is that our filing issues are now solved.
And yes it was costly,
A disaster of course,
The lack of safety procedures concerning,
But to us academics
These are simply polemics;
After all, physics is all about learning.
And as consequence
We've published the results
In journals of highest esteem,
And we hope you'll consider,
On better reflection,
Rehiring the whole physics team?
So in summary here,
We just wanted to say,
We apologise for what we have done,
But it wasn't our fault,
Funding cuts were to blame,
And the nuclear fusion of the sun.