SCIENCE POETRY
Deep in the time of eclipse
As birds bed down and dusk creeps up
We see the Suns halo and crown
Reaching out to her children
Light in the darkness
Sunlight scatters from escaping electrons
Bounces off minute dust particles
While stripped atoms glow as crown jewels
Incandescently hot
Ethereal furnace
The act of seeing makes real
The fact of knowing sees beauty
The inner joyousness of the Universe
Lifts me
Up to the light
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Go on a starlit night,
stand on your head,
leave your feet dangling
outwards into space,
and let the starry
firmament you tread
be, for the moment,
your elected base.
Feel Earth’s colossal weight
of ice and granite,
of molten magma,
water, iron, and lead;
and briefly hold
this strangely solid planet
balanced upon
your strangely solid head.
– Piet Hein
Piet Hein is a scientist poet. And one of the great scientists of the 20th century.
I dreamed I saw a galaxy explode,
A massive spiral champion shorn of arms,
And eons passed in seconds through my brain;
The evolution of the cosmic wheel,
The whirling stellar city born of gas,
Had finished in a scattering of stars;
Where stars had moved in orbits, night remained.
I dreamed I saw the universe explode,
The clusters and the superclusters dash
In routed panic, as my eyes supposed,
From one another; yet between their paths,
Along their paths of flight, below, above,
Passed vehicles on journeys none foresee:
Imagination crumbled at the sight.
I dreamed I saw an ultracluster turn,
And watched the superclusters move on paths
Within this mightiest of structured forms
Of which the whole creation has been made;
I saw the stars burn out, the galaxies
Disperse and perish, till the turning form
Sped like a cinder through infinity.
Wade Wellman
Another fine Physics poem from Kate:
NASA’s detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that grew into galaxies.
Where space holds no matter,
There vacuum is the void.
Where you expect there’s nothing,
Instead there’s quantum’s ploy.
Dark energy that causes
A strange propensity
Is driven by the vacuum
Decreasing density,
With vast immensity
It dissipates the energy,
But retains the mystery
Of quantum gravity –
The structure of space-time.
By Kate Rauner
2nd edition now available! Expanded!
Thanks to livescience.com and a new study published in the May 15 issue of the journal Physical Review D. I don’t have the math to speak quantum physics, and it still boggles my mind. Gravity – the only one of the four basic forces I have an intuitive feel for – refuses to fit into theoretical physics. But if gravity is the shape of space-time, then…
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The Kingdom of Number is all boundaries
Which may be beautiful and must be true;
To ask if it is big or small proclaims one
The sort of lover who should stick to faces.
Lovers of small numbers go benignly potty,
Believe all tales are thirteen chapters long,
Have animal doubles, carry pentagrams,
Are Millerites, Baconians, Flat-Earth-Men.
Lovers of big numbers go horridly mad,
Would have the Swiss abolished, all of us
Well purged, somatotyped, baptised, taught baseball:
They empty bars, spoil parties, run for Congress.
True, between faces almost any number
Might come in handy, and One is always real;
But which could any face call good, for calling
Infinity a number does not make it one.
(It’s relative, generally speaking)
The angle of incidence – the collision
The angle of reflection— the realization
Burned by the egregious refraction
Of searching eyes
What is the (anti) matter
Stretched between magnetic fields
Of Reason and Desire
How will the equation balance—
One side must invariably be solved
(You)—
A centripetal force inveigling —
Explain entropic delusions
and test assumptions of reality.
Poem submitted as part of community poetry prompts at https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/
A drop at a time from the burette,
known into unknown,
waiting for the giveaway colour change;
titration on a quiet afternoon.
She wanted to be a boy.
Drip drip drip,
Pink pink pink,
Princesses, ribbons; smile.
Pretty dresses, don’t get dirty,
tidiness, helpfulness,
the good wife always…
She looked a mess, climbed trees,
wrestled with her younger brother;
went topless on sunny days
in the woods, wore jeans.
Because they were fourteen
Because they were a gang
Because women gag for it
Because it was easy
A drop at a time from the burette,
known into unknown,
the whole world in a colour change;
titration on a quiet afternoon.
By Ruth Aylet
Originally published at https://thefatdamsel.wordpress.com/issue-2-part-2/
Ruth Aylett teaches computing at Heriot-Watt University. She is also a prize-winning poet and writer, whose work has appeared in New Writing Scotland; Doire Press, Textualities; Estuary – a confluence of Art and Poetry; Ink, Sweat and Tears and elsewhere. She has read as a Shore Poets New Poet and at many Inky Fingers events. Read more about her work here.
