There’s a philosophical anecdote that’s relevant to physicists today: One must stay afloat and rebuild the boat when, out at sea, safe harbor’s far away. The cargo is loaded, voyage begun, and progress made can’t be abandoned now, […]
Read more "RIGGED FOR SUCCESS"Press play then scroll along QUARK OF FATE Since we ourselves learned how to create, we’ve pondered our night sky’s creation. “Twinkle, Twinkle,” was the song we sang, till Science showed stars are condensate of dust and background radiation from the silent light of the Big Bang. We thought their motions controlled […]
Read more "Quark Of Fate"Poetry and Science Science tries to answer some great questions, in fact the greatest questions of our day. At very least, it offers suggestions for how to frame these questions, anyway. This role is one that poets, too, have played. Both correlate their data to convey their particular premise and persuade, or at least to […]
Read more "Poetry And Science"While not included in Bard Of Mars, this is a limerick tribute to Professor Sara Seager of MIT, who kindly authored the foreword to the book. She also was inspiration for the haiku above and below. Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is a Professor […]
Read more "Seager, Ye Shall Find"“I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.”
– Paul Dirac to Robert Oppenheimer
“You forgot that science has evolved from poetry, and failed to see that a change of times might beneficently reunite the two as friends, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
FINE-TUNED FOR LIFE Ours is the perfect universe, it seems, for forming atoms that will let suns burn. Anthropically, there are few other schemes to give such a magnificent return. The arbitrary masses we’ve discerned for subatomic particles create a balance of the forces, we have learned, whereby life is allowed to generate. Change any […]
Read more "Fine-Tuned For Life"UNIQUE PARAMETERS There is only one answer to creation. Though we don’t nearly understand it yet, there’s but one elegant variation emerging from initial values set that even allows molecules to be, much less achieve complexity of life, or suns to burn their planets distantly with not too much but with the needed strife. […]
Read more "Unique Parameters"BUBBLE UNIVERSES Our universe may be embedded in a bulk containing other bubble realms, while we are just a hologram within. The implication is what overwhelms. Though this explains why gravity’s perverse, our cosmos, then, is not the whole shebang. Are we part of a frothy multi-verse where one’s black hole is another’s Big […]
Read more "Bubble Universes"STICK THEORY If God wanted us to know everything the universe would have stopped expanding, or, at least, its speed should be lessening, allowing us to gain understanding. If we are limited to speed of light, while God stretches the fabric far faster, then, as long as we’re here, try as we might, […]
Read more "Stick Theory"OBSERVING OBSERVERS Per perceiving predilection’s effect, researchers search precautions to assure that their constructed theories won’t be wrecked by accredited critics who abjure results from lax experimentation which funnels too few affecting factors. Scientist’s psyches lack isolation – all audiences are also actors. Objectivity varies with the minds involved whose realities rarely budge; what one […]
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BARD OF MARS 