- 80 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
Throughout his long career, James Applewhite has skillfully navigated the world of science through poetry. His new book makes no exception, fearlessly exploring time and consciousness in relation to the universe as described by Big Bang cosmology -- and as experienced by human beings in the everyday world. Applying experiences from his present-day life as well as a multitude of memories from his childhood to scientific theories of the nature of the universe, the poet engages in a patient but relentless -- and finally deeply rewarding -- quest for a sense of meaning in a cosmos whose dimensions of space and time defy the human capacity to imagine.
In his quest, Applewhite suggests the continuing possibility of a crucial connection to the universe through our seemingly tiny, evanescent experiences here on planet Earth. The poems in Cosmos help us value the human-related dimensions of being all the more as they are discerned against the cosmic vastness.
"We've known for a long time gravitydoesn't exist, " Dr. Verlinde said.This adhesion of all mass to itself isfollowing the vector of energy downwardwith the thermodynamic arrow, which pierces uswith our moments. The illusion encloses, scenes in mind return nonsensically -- my foot slips on the slick bank and fora moment suspended in fallingI know the time slow down, seeingthe red-star sweet gum leafsliding with the current's surfacethat holds the late September skyand heat in a thin film.
Then I pierce it, splashing through -- the rowboat my brother called the Peanut Shellrocking out from the bank whileI arise back through the brown creekskin and into air of the dream worldI know so well, where Henry is laughing.
-- from "Reading the Science News"
Frequently asked questions
CONVERSATION IN FACULTY COMMONS
Austrian—a cosmic theorist.
I studied physics formerly,
loved astronomy as a boy.
Among faculty colleagues,
we talk across salads, in words like these:
primordial—violent—unconscious?”
in the painting by Turner.”
Then unwisely derided.
But why this cosmos without sight?”
Dark at first. Don’t you recall
describing to me the first fireball?”
time we met.”
The nothing. The empty O.”
you brightened to hear of the release of light.”
you told me, “no light appears.”
at the beginning of the universe?”
I imagined this being, of only one eye.”
descriptions without mythology.”
I say, “in darkness. Then the birth of light.”
is a blind eyeball instead?”
light in dark, order in violence.
I need to dramatize
the event your numbers realize.”
The first tight sphere of heat
withholds its light,
like an in-turned eyeball
foreseeing all,
and finally evolving sight.”
he says. “I accept this poetic mistake.
Early on, the fireball was opaque.”
“Then it reached a critical boundary,
cooling, and the universe began to see.”
The fireball underwent a phase-transition,
reaching a temperature where atoms form.
Then light shone free, this one early time.”
I say, “light is like embodied thought—
beautiful, transiently real.
Physically immaterial.”
Photons form, in the breaking symmetry.
Light responds, slightly,
to the curvature of gravity.”
create all space and time?”
with the outward, cooling momentum of energy.”
I ask, “inter-convertible, why is the direction
of time one-way—from unity to separation?”
whereon physicists should have no opinion.”
We arise from its violent histories.
edge.”
he says. “You poets are in love with chaos.”
thought-feeling, in a rough embrace.”
an uncanny one, without meaning.”
There is theory, experiment—and verification.”
than the philosophers of ancient Greece.
Or of Alexandria. However. The emerging
order is richly fostering.
It encodes a tendency
toward coherence, within partial stability.”
the limited, from infinity.”
describe such things mathematically—
without auras of divine intent.”
He pauses. “Yet there was an event,
when spacetime emerged from an a-spatial point.”
I say.
far away in time.”
I say.
parameters,” he adds.
that you mentioned once?”
and mass of the universe,
in their almost-perfected balance.”
Begin with proton and electron.”
to the nucleus negative to positive.”
so that atoms interact chemically.”
use elemental energy of the cosmos,
once frozen into mass—
now, in its new release,
by the process of solar fusion.
Because of proton and electron.”
he says, pleasantly. “You simplify
a very great complexity. Such stuff
is part of a feel-good ecology.”
exists, rather than nothing. Or chaos.”
The strong force, within the nucleus,
in proportion to electromagnetic force.
The lesser, nuclear weak force,
randomly regulating atomic decay.”
I ask.
would permit no change over time,”
he answers.
variability, between proton and neutron?”
in the nucleus is held within vaster gravity.”
allows the stars to coalesce
and burn, in an immense curvature of space?”
He smiles. “We have order to celebrate.”
curve even light into webs of entropy—
within, apparently, dark matter, dark energy.”
quite understand those concepts yet.”
that a clearer theory is inevitable.”
I say. “Time’s crooked arrow, pointing one way.
A snake in the garden, as physical decay.”
my enjoying a dessert.
Won’t you join me?”
“Do you find a consolation in taste?”
I say. “But the pleasure is brief.”
It is beginning, tending toward ending.
Do you see any purpose in the universe?”
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Reading the Science News
- A Premonition
- Night Writing
- The Guests
- Platonic Astronomy
- Cooper’s Hawk
- Two in October Light
- Practice Bombing
- The Sea Connection
- A Cemetery in Normandy
- In the Gardens Beside a Library
- Anthropic Cosmological Principle
- Hemlock Hill
- Learning the Directions
- Unpublished Interview
- Repairing the Farmhouse
- The Home Place
- Reforested Land
- A Hotel Tower above Oahu
- The Late April Garden
- Conversation in Faculty Commons
- First Light
- The Shadowed Counterpane
- Imagining Origin
- Time in the First Village
- Membrane Theory
- Quest for Beginning
- First Star
- Coming Home in the Dark
- The Language of Space and Time
- Driving from Columbia