DARK GRAVITY The speed of light’s the limit, so we hold, as frequencies get stretched past infrared, and all the universe is growing cold a process that apparently has sped almost impossibly since it began because expansion should reduce its vim, and gravity should be custodian and sweep together, not its antonym. Thermodynamics on the […]
Read more "DARK GRAVITY"COLD COMFORT When life on this planet seems cumbersome and weighted with serious magnitude, delight dragged down by deep opprobrium, I pad into the kitchen for some food. In front of the refrigerator, I see tacked with tacky magnets your sweet face, in photographs that we took last July, and what was crushing becomes an […]
Read more "COLD COMFORT"Further inspired by Robert Frost’s form, this poem touches on the very sensitive membrane of a black hole, where although we know physics breaks down, we hope its laws will nonetheless point the way through the chaos of infinities we encounter at a singularity’s boundary. But what happens when things accelerate into a black hole, […]
Read more "EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLES"“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
Unusual for a Shakespearean sonnet, perhaps, Special Relativity is summed up here in iambic pentameter. Press play to hear this read by the author.
Read more "Special Relativity"Ask a geologist about rocks, and she (or he) might tell you about sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous, then describe their differences based upon how they were formed. The fact is that everything heavier than air was formed in the same way — in the interior of mega-stars, fated to explode. We may be considered stardust, but we […]
Read more "Rock Garden"Life in interstellar space will have its perks. ASTRONAUTICAL JOYS One day the horizon won’t seem so vast, when we step off the planet of our birth. In space, we’ll look ahead into the past to find a future never seen on Earth. The farther out we look the further back we see to the […]
Read more "Astronautical Joys"Dark Energy is the other component that constitutes the universe. It seems to be a product of space itself, and over great distances can act to reverse the effects of gravity, driving objects away from each other. No one knows what Dark Energy is, but based on it’s effects upon distant galaxies, and its even […]
Read more "Lighten Up"Though they’ll claim science is observation,
that’s often tweaked to fit the equation.
Unlit on the stage, the dark juggler must be there, though we just see stars.
Read more "Orbiting A Black Hole"
BARD OF MARS 