Is there a poet who exists who isn’t fascinated by the sky? Who hasn’t, at one point or another, laid on their back in a field or a desert or a parking lot or on top of a picnic table and felt dwarfed by the immensity of space? Who hasn’t wondered what is out there, and why we exist here? Why we have the wherewithal to wonder at all?
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One of the founders of quantum mechanics, the physicist Paul Dirac, said of poetry,
“The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.”
He is wrong, of course—about the goals of poetry, about its compatibility with science—but he illustrates the dichotomy well, the split where there need not be a split. If you dial it down to the root questions, physicists and poets have a great deal in common. We want to know how it all started, and we want to know what happens at the end. We want to understand those places at the edges—where time stops, where uncertainty finds its way in, where consciousness begins. We are trying to make sense of the nonsensical, trying to use the nonsensical to feel our way to the truth.
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Metaphysical questions about existence and the universe are not rare in poetry; neither is the lyric appreciation of the moon and the stars. These were some of the first subjects in what has become a very long tradition.
Science was even, in a sense, born in poetry: Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things is one of the best known Roman explorations of the theory of atomism, from the first century BCE. But at some point the two disciplines diverged. In the nineteenth century, Romantic poets tended to approach science in one of two ways. Either they would dismiss it as inhumane and mechanical—à la Keats, who accused Newton of “unweav[ing] a rainbow” by discovering how one forms, or Walt Whitman, who wrote that while hearing an astronomer speak, he “soon unaccountable … became tired and sick.” Or they would treat scientific ideas with a kind of frustrated, quasi-religious mysticism, ultimately preferring to know less and dream more, as in Emily Dickinson’s poem:
It troubled me as once I was —
For I was once a Child —
Concluding how an Atom — fell —
And yet the Heavens — held —
[…]
Life set me larger — problems —
Some I shall keep — to solve
Till Algebra is easier —
Or simpler proved — above —
While I love the Romantics and their calls to the sublime, I appreciate Dickinson’s approach to science. Her acknowledgement of confusion, of difficulty. Of the scientific question as one worth engaging with. Mysticism is a reverence reserved for that which we do not understand—that which is larger than us. What is poetry if not a vehicle for the mystical? You can see Dickinson’s influence continuing into the modern day in Marie Howe’s “Singularity,” where the poet longs for an experience of the universe at the start—“before we came to believe humans were so important / before this awful loneliness.”
But the more negative interpretation—the view of science and scientists as cold, mechanical, and destructive forces in society—has lasted just as strongly in the poetic tradition. Even as our lay understanding of scientific discovery deepens, a great deal of very good poetry has found inspiration in our anxiety about what exactly our species will do with these revelations; see T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and its apocalyptic technologies, or Inger Christensen’s dizzying collection Alphabet, which uses the Fibonnaci sequence to catalog both the beauties of the world and the many weapons we’ve invented to destroy that beauty. Or, even more plainly, consider the opening lines from Robert Frost’s “Why Wait for Science?”—
Sarcastic Science she would like to know,
In her complacent Ministry of Fear,
How we propose to get away from here
When she has made things so we have to go
Or be wiped out.
You might define these two approaches as such: a school of wonder and a school of fear. You might find that, in the present day, these schools have begun to converge. We could call it a poetics of awe.
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A fact: All the matter and light we can experience and see makes up just 5 percent of the universe. The rest is hiding in the darkness.
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In the 1960s, theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said:
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part…. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”
That was sixty years ago, more recent than Dickinson’s or Whitman’s time, but well before the dawn of personal computers and the Internet and sixteen straight years of superhero movies set in space. Today we live in a world in which science books hit the bestseller charts and stay there, in which millions of people tuned in to watch the Perseverance rover land on Mars, in which a movie about Robert Oppenheimer’s 1954 government hearing won seven Oscars. A world in which the hyper-wealthy are bidding astronomical sums to spend eleven minutes outside Earth’s atmosphere. At this point, science could hardly be considered a fringe interest, even among poets, who still tend to prefer the metaphysical world of ideas to any mathematically derived understanding of the physical world.
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We might call both poetry and physics arts of translation. There is a desire for metaphor; there is a need to fit language around what is wordless, strange, inexplicable.
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We also live in a world where gender equality has not been achieved. Physics is still, as it was in Feynman’s and Dirac’s time, mostly the domain of men. According to a recent study, though women outnumber men at universities in general, men are projected to outnumber women in physics for another 134 years. There are plenty of reasons for this phenomenon—girls dropping out of science and math classes at alarming rates, the ones who stay choosing to focus on other disciplines—largely rooted in social conditioning and sexism.
I am one such case: in my senior year of high school, after years of average performance in math, which is really to say performance that required effort to maintain, I decided I was not the sort of person who liked purposeless equations and told my parents I would take physics instead, as a compromise. Physics is math in the real world, I argued, though it was obvious to everyone that I was far more interested in the ideas than the math. I had always loved learning about science—but I was right about one thing, physics required math, physics was the real world translated into a language in which I was not quite fluent, a fact that embarrassed me but was true nonetheless. Even when I understood the theories, the equations eluded me. I could never remember them for the tests.
I already knew I wanted to be a writer, an artist. Artists, I thought, lived in the ephemeral world, the world of feeling, not the world of numbers and data. Did I need to know the speed at which objects fall in a vacuum to understand that gravity exists and exerts its force on me every day? My formal physics education went no further.
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There is a strange sort of thing that happens when you hit young adulthood, when society makes you think you need to decide right away who you will become. It seems it will be impossible to achieve success with any given interest without blocking out all others, so you do, you dial down into the one thing and you become an expert in it. You push aside everything else, all the other things you love that don’t quite fit. Until they refuse to be pushed aside any longer, and your informal—but arguably far more important, for the passionate curiosity that drives it—education begins.
So I could tell you that I have always loved facts, science, and data. Or I could say that I have loved the world, and over time I have found in these things a way to love it better, a way to channel the vertiginous awe that some reserve for religion or sex or seeing the sun rise from a mountaintop.
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But what else is out there—out in the darkness?
We first discovered dark energy, which according to NASA comprises about 70 percent of the universe, when we realized that the universe was expanding even faster than the math would predict. “Dark energy” as a term means nothing; there are plenty of theories, but no one has any real idea what it is. Mysteries abound. Poets flock to the darkness like moths to a flame.
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The thing I didn’t understand about science early on is this: Everything you’re taught in school is something that’s already been discovered. But not everything has been discovered. There are uncountable questions to be asked, problems to solve, creative solutions to be found. It’s a testament to the human brain that concepts that took hundreds of years for us to grasp are now considered fundamental and taught to children in a span of about ten years. It’s a testament to the complexity of the universe that we still know so very little.
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The scale of it is what fascinates me most—the scale and the emptiness. The nearest star to us other than the sun is Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away. A light year is the distance a beam of light moving in a straight line travels in one year. This is roughly equivalent to 9.46 trillion kilometers.
The fastest man-made object is currently the NASA Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018. By 2025 it will travel as fast as 690,000 kilometers per hour, or 0.064 percent of the speed of light. Traveling at that speed—a speed it hasn’t even reached yet—it would take the probe 6,642 Earth years to reach Proxima Centauri.
Another way to put this: If a probe traveling at this speed had left Earth at the dawn of the first recorded human civilizations in 4000 BCE, it would still be traveling today. It would not reach Proxima Centauri for another 618 years.
What would it see out there, in all that time? Would it recognize the world it left behind?
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In the last fifteen years or so in America, there have been a number of brilliant poetry books published that deal, in one way or another, with physics and cosmology—Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith, But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm, Space Struck by Paige Lewis, In Accelerated Silence by Brooke Matson, If This Is the Age We End Discovery by Rosebud Ben-Oni, Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson, and my own book, Tell This to the Universe, to name just a few. These collections are, to my knowledge (which is by no means comprehensive), all written by women or nonbinary people. I do not think this is an accident; I think men who have a deep interest in physics tend to go all in and study it, make it their life’s work. The rest of us might fall away even as it stays with us, influencing how we live our lives and how we make sense of our anxieties and our awes and our griefs and our relationships with the world around us.
The collections named above are interesting for their breadth—the way the universe reveals itself in each one. Smith and Matson look to the universe for solace in grief, and find much more; Bertram plays with form and mathematics to illuminate Earth-bound concerns; Lewis and Ben-Oni explore alienation and longing though a personal, playful lens; Johnson and Wahmanholm take on the horrors of a ruined Earth and the body in decay. When I read each of these poets I can feel a new universe forming within me, disconnected particles in collision; I can see shades of my own human concerns in all of them, refracted strange. It fills me with awe and wonder.
There is, I think, a throughline: a certain darkness or dissociation, a certain fear of the unknown, of how much we know we do not know and cannot understand. The work expresses itself in music, or through unexpected and invented forms. There is often an element of the surreal, of absurdist humor thrown like a veil over a deep well of pain, or an ironic detachment, or a tender sincerity. As poets we come to the universe with our fears—about what we have done to the Earth and to each other, about where we can possibly go next, about what it means to be a collection of atoms with a consciousness. We look for answers where answers cannot be found, and we find something else, and that something else is precisely what poetry is made of.
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This is perhaps the real difference between physicists and poets—the naked vulnerability with which we approach the subject, and where we find the center. Who the work is for. Scientists have long been taught to be objective, to separate their emotions from the work to reduce the possibility of corrupting it. They take the observable world and attempt to learn how it functions on its own terms—an impossible task but a noble one. Poets walk through the world unprotected and overwhelmed, and we translate those experiences into art, in the hope that the art will reach another human who needs it or understands.
It is an utterly human creation that exists with the understanding that human experience is all we have of the world, all we will ever have. That connection is the key. No matter how deep into the darkness we might wish to retreat.