Science poetry

[goingtothedo]

Hi, i'm new on this forum, so I thought a bit of the kind of thing that interests me might be appropriate. I penned this a couple of years ago on a bitingly cold Christmas night.

 

 

 

 

Christmas on the Doorstep

 

 

I look above to velvet sky amid the Winter night,

Orion rising through the dark, Rigel blue and bright.

I see Hunter’s sword where misty birthing stars shine clear,

And glowering Betelgeuse, dimly red, marks the dark months of the year.

 

In aged bloated body, the giant’s embers glowing low,

Self devoured, consumed within, ashes choking now,

The time will come, the spark will fade, pressures no more to be borne,

And the giant will blaze in his final incandescent morn.

 

Betelgeuse awaits the day his fires dim and die,

When he will burst his iron heart in his final fiery cry,

The Red Hand of the Hunter will shed his sundered flesh,

In a divine wind suicidal, to nurse his children’s creche.

 

The shattering of his death throes will seed all coming things,

Tin, silver and nitrogen, and gold, the gift of kings,

Oxygen, uranium, all these he will give,

And carbon darkly bright, that his children’s childer might live.

 

The Hunter’s sword in spangled sky shines with birthclouds bright,

Full circle round the story comes in gleam of new starlight.

“Fiat Lux” says the old tale, but the wonder strikes me through,

When from my garden step, at my own back door, I see the birthing of the new.

 

The new stars gleam like diamond dust studded in dusky swirl,

And shimmering vapours shroud the stars in glowing, glimmering pearl.

We live in a universe of marvels, all there for anyone to find,

Needing only open eyes and ears, and more, an open mind.

 

They say we are born of ashes. They say we go to dust.

But they never said how this came to be. It irks me and thus,

This night I leave the party, to stand amid icy blast,

The sound of Jingle Bells and Silent Night from the indoors drifting past.

 

I watch the skies through lucid air, and the birthing stars proclaim

The cyclic story, creation’s glory and how the death of others became,

The birth of the new, the start of all. Creation’s children are us.

Ashes to ashes? But what ashes! We are all born of stardust.

 

 

As an addendum, "Betelguese", an arabic word translates to mean "the red hand of the hunter".

[Martin]

Welcome!

 

not bad.

 

science poetry can give a window on nature at very small or large scale. It helps make memorable and give meaning to things normally out of our ken. probably a lot of us already know this one called Cosmic Gall by the poet John Updike

 

Neutrinos, they are very small.

They have no charge, they've scarcely mass

And hardly interact at all.

The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

They snub the most exquisite gas,

Ignore the most substantial wall,

Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,

Insult the stallion in his stall,

And, scorning barriers of class,

Infiltrate you and me. Like tall

And painless guillotines they fall

Down through our heads into the grass.

At night, they enter at Nepal

And pierce the lover and his lass

From underneath the bed—you call

It wonderful; I call it crass.

 

 

(apologies to the author for emending line 2 to allow for the tiny, but nonzero, mass of neutrinos)

 

technically remarkable, 19 lines with only two rhymes

10 rhymes like "small" and 9 like "mass"

If you didnt know, he teaches you that solar neutrinos go thru earth and come up out of the ground on the nightside

passing up thru us "from underneath the bed"

plus a witty ending

[kanzure]

There are some simple chemistry poems here, and here are some more chemistry poems for each of the elements, which helps with memorization and is pretty cool when one becomes able to bust out with 20 lines of poetics on a final exam.

 

From the self-acclaimed page of "cheap" science quotes:

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. . . . I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything."

 

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975)

"Hydrogen"

 

The real world is a jumble of awesome complexity and immeasureable charm. Even the inanimate, inorganic world of rocks and stone, rivers and ocean, air and wind is a boundless wonder. Add to that the ingredient of life, and the wonder is multiplied almost beyond imagination. Yet all this wonder springs from about one hundred components that are strung together, mixed, compacted, and linked, as letters are linked to form a literature. It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the ever-astonishing power of human reason (as potent then as now) — to discover this reduction of the world to its components, the chemical elements. Such reduction does not destroy its charm but adds understanding to sensation, and this understanding only deepens our delight.

 

P. W. Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey into the Land of the Chemical Elements (1995)

 

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost maniacal impulse to seek their pleasures amongst smoke and vapour, soot and flames, poisons and poverty, yet amongst all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that I would rather die than change places with the King of Persia.

 

Johann Joachim Becher, Physica Subterranea (1667)

quoted in Paul Strathern, Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements (2000)

 

We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far: it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future trade.

 

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975)

"Iron"

 

But this is no longer the time for sprites, nickel, and kobolds. We are chemists, that is, hunters: ours are "the two experiences of adult life" of which Pavese spoke, success and failure, to kill the white whale or wreck the ship; one should not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not just sit down. We are here for this — to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out. We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce and probe it, look for the opening or make it. My weekly conversations with the lieutenant sounded like war plans.

 

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975)

"Nickel"

 

The fact that alloxan, destined to embellish ladies' lips, would come from the excrement of chickens or pythons was a thought which didn't trouble me for a moment. The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals to us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.

 

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975)

"Nitrogen"

 

... well, you asked for it. So fly now: you wanted to be free and you are free, you wanted to be a chemist and you are one. So now grub among poisons, lipsticks, and chicken shit; granulate tin, pour hydrochloric acid; concentrate, decant, and crystallize if you do not want to go hungry, and you know hunger.

 

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975)

"Tin"

 

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

 

- Douglas Adams

 

Though not in the form of poetry most are accustomed to, these still have that special poetic prose embedded in the sentences. And then there are all of those many science-related anecdotes, like when Planck was trying to get to his own lecture but was prevented entry because the receptionist thought he was too young to attend the lecture of highly valued Professor Planck, or Zues and his mechanical computers in his parents' kitchen, etc.

 

One last poem from Tesla:

I Haunted thee were the ibis nods,

From the Bracken's crag to the Upas Tree.

 

Nikola Tesla, November 4, 1934

 

"Fragments of Olympian Gossip"

 

While listening on my cosmic phone

I caught words from the Olympus blown.

A newcomer was shown around;

That much I could guess, aided by sound.

"There's Archimedes with his lever

Still busy on problems as ever.

Says: matter and force are transmutable

And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"Below, on Earth, they work at full blast

And news are coming in thick and fast.

The latest tells of a cosmic gun.

To be pelted is very poor fun.

We are wary with so much at stake,

Those beggars are a pest—no mistake."

"Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown

And turned your great science upside down.

Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,

Puts on your high teaching all the blame.

Says: matter and force are transmutable

And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"I am much too ignorant, my son,

For grasping schemes so finely spun.

My followers are of stronger mind

And I am content to stay behind,

Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,

These masters of mine may do the rest.

Come, Kelvin, I have finished my cup.

When is your friend Tesla coming up."

"Oh, quoth Kelvin, he is always late,

It would be useless to remonstrate."

Then silence—shuffle of soft slippered feet—

I knock and—the bedlam of the street.

 

Nikola Tesla, Novice

[goingtothedo]

Thanks for the replies folks. i love science poetry, but so much of it is limited to limericks etc. I try to catch the "Wow" factor and that is what I look for in other pieces.

 

Any links are wlecome:-)

[Martin]

Iron heart is good, because a commontype supernova works by the star fusing hydrogen up to iron in its core and then the core cant fuse any further and doesnt have the energy to resist the weight of the outer layers and so the iron core collapses catastrophically and explodes by release of gravitational energy

 

Betelgeuse awaits the day his fires dim and die,

When he will burst his iron heart in his final fiery cry,

The Red Hand of the Hunter will shed his sundered flesh,

In a divine wind suicidal, to nurse his children’s creche.

 

The shattering of his death throes will seed all coming things,

Tin, silver and nitrogen, and gold, the gift of kings,

Oxygen, uranium, all these he will give,

And carbon darkly bright, that his children’s childer might live.

 

The Hunter’s sword in spangled sky shines with birthclouds bright,

Full circle round the story comes in gleam of new starlight.

“Fiat Lux” says the old tale, but the wonder strikes me through,

When from my garden step, at my own back door, I see the birthing of the new.

===============

 

I find correct scientific information here. Supernovas do seed the surrounding space with stuff essential to the formation of habitable planets and incidentally ourtype carbon lifeform.

they also start chainreactions of star formation---shockwaves from supernovas momentarily concentrate gasclouds and start their selfgravitating collapse and eventual condensation----we see this going on in star-forming regions like the one in ORION that you mention specifically

===============

 

besides correct information, I get some thrills. I experienced, for example, the verse I colored blue as real poetry.

 

I wish there were more like this to read and discuss, but I don't happen to know any.

 

One is lucky to get any at all.

[goingtothedo]

Martin, It pleases me enormously that you seem to have enjoyed reading that so much; mainly because you seem to have got out of it exactly what I intended; correct information and my sense of the poetry of what lies around us.

 

Although I havea huge interest in all things science, and a technical education (my background is in engineering and I've done a few units with the Open University) that fact is that I'm not involved in anything like that now in my day to day work. I'll never be able to contribute to "real" science, so I do this kind of thing instead.

 

Thus encouraged, I think I'll post another one. It's called "The Truth" and I'm just deciding whether it belongs in Astronomy and Cosmology" or in General Science.

[jbahr]

I have been looking for interesting science poetry for a while. Albert Goldbarth often has some interesting work. C. Dale Young and I have both published poems that include a sigma Here's mine, from the Spoon River Poetry Review:

 

Do The Math

 

From its core to its curved cooling griddle, photons take 50,000 years to bang

around and spin off progeny of less and less ambition. Poles shift and pop up

at the sun’s equator and, every 11 years, sunspots dot the photosphere like someone

making dollar pancakes. Back on track, light spends 500 seconds of unperturbed

 

isolation, then slams our little planet. It would, of course, kill us in a minute. Luckily,

the troposphere absorbs all but enough to give my second wife a nice even tan and leave

with the guy in the Miata. She would chat from the balcony while I computed how much information

passed from her mouth to the man with the sports car, roughly

 

-∑ Pm log2 Pm

 

Think of the little m’s as mass, momentum, and my missing heartbeats. She the free radical,

and I the banker in a convex mirror. There’s a theorem that shows that some things

are unknowable. Thank God Einstein died before we found particles popping out of nowhere.

My second wife showed up 20 years later, but that’s another poem, like a proof by induction:

 

Step 1: Verify that the desired result holds for n=1.

Step 2: Assume that the desired result holds for n=k.

Step 3: Use the assumption from Step 2 to show that the result holds for n=(k+1).

 

Note how desire insinuates itself into the simplest of mathematical methods. Think Albert

and his mistresses, Descartes and his need to unknow God (of course he’d been through

a war). There’s no science of desire. It’s older than that. I thought I’d be a paleontologist.

By the time Alvarez and his son predicted the meteor that annihilated the Yucatan, I was already

 

on to algorithms. They’re like those mail-order plastic mats with footprints

and arrows that teach you how to samba. They don’t always work, they’re counting on

abandonment. And desire, two apogees of the pendulum. There's one the size of a Kronos

yo-yo in the Smithsonian. It's hard to watch it and not wonder how it stays true. Ignoring

 

the spin of the world. Back and forth through the light of the canopy. As if it knows

where it’s going and then, just as certain, changes its mind.

 

~~~

 

I'm currently struggling with cosmology. I was a physics major a long time ago, but things have gotten a lot more complicated. Thank God for Google.

 

J

[Martin]

there is a lot of interesting natural history in this

 

like suncore photons at 15 million kelvin have Xray wavelength and they take 10s of 1000s of years to percolate out to the surface by which time one has split up into thousands of "less ambitious" progeny photons.

 

its good. the line with the Shannon information bound comes like a punch. they were talking the maxium the channel could carry----which would give me a doomed feeling.

 

I have been looking for interesting science poetry for a while. Albert Goldbarth often has some interesting work. C. Dale Young and I have both published poems that include a sigma Here's mine, from the Spoon River Poetry Review:

 

Do The Math

 

From its core to its curved cooling griddle, photons take 50,000 years to bang

around and spin off progeny of less and less ambition.

...

 

-∑ Pm log2 Pm

 

...

My second wife showed up 20 years later, but that’s another poem, like a proof by induction:

 

Step 1: Verify that the desired result holds for n=1.

Step 2: Assume that the desired result holds for n=k.

Step 3: Use the assumption from Step 2 to show that the result holds for n=(k+1).

 

...

, I was already

on to algorithms. They’re like those mail-order plastic mats with footprints

and arrows that teach you how to samba. They don’t always work, they’re counting on

abandonment. ... Back and forth through the light of the canopy. As if it knows

where it’s going and then, just as certain, changes its mind.

 

 

the idea that the wife comes back after 20 years LIKE A PROOF BY INDUCTION is very funny----to a math or computer science major, especially if they had some grad school. It is not an "in joke" because it doesnt make you feel cosy because you know. It is just plain surrealistically FUNNY.

that is how some dreadful inevitable deja vu things in life are, like a proof by induction.

 

Also in the poem he EXPLAINS what a proof by induction is, and this in my mind makes him not a clique-ish sophisticate user of science and math but a completely open and un-snobish. that's good.

 

he says desire and abandonment are two ends of a huge (foucault) pendulum swing that knows where it wants to go whether it is going this way or that way.

this is deep ironical wisdom---Ecclesiastes in a clownsuit.

you cant tell if it an eternal truth or goofy bullshît

I think that means its good.

I don't normally like poetry that doesn't rhyme but I like this

 

maybe I will look up Spoon River review