Regarding the A in STEAM

This past summer I was walking on campus when in a window I saw something I would not expect to see at a technical school – a flyer with the following poem printed on it:

I don’t care how God-damn smart these guys are: I’m bored. It’s been raining like hell all day long and there’s nothing to do

and a photo of Caltech’s first and only poet in residence, Richard Brautigan.

The more I thought about it, however, I realized that there is a strong connection between science and poetry. They both have ways of drawing our attention and awareness to what we otherwise might not see. Poetry can simplify the complex in the same way that the scientific method can. In this way, the two are not dissimilar.

Around 1939, Carl Sagan wrote

It is an exhilarating experience to read poetry and observe its correlation with modern science.

It is believed that he wrote this for his high school newspaper in his middle teens, and it remains true to this day.

Katie Mack is a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics, currently holding the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Premier Institute in Canada. Her poem Disorientation was publicly released on the North Carolina State College of Sciences News website at the beginning of 2019. It reads as follows:

I want to make you dizzy

I want to make you look up into the sky and comprehend, maybe for the first time, the darkness that lies beyond the evanescent wisp of the atmosphere, the endless depths of the cosmos, a desolation by degrees

I want the Earth to turn beneath you and knock your balance off, carry you eastward at a thousand miles an hour, into the light, and the dark, and the light again. I want you to watch the Earth rising you up to meet the rays of the morning sun

I want the sky to stop you dead in your tracks on your walk home tonight, because you happened to glance up and among all the shining pinpricks you recognized one as of the light of an alien world

I want you to taste the iron in your blood and see its likeness in the rust-red sands on the long dry dunes of Mars, born of the same nebular dust that coalesced random flotsam of stellar debris into rocks, oceans, your own beating heart

I want to reach into your consciousness and cast it outward, beyond the light of other suns, to expand it like the universe, not encroaching on some envelope of emptiness, but growing larger, unfolding inside itself

I want you to see your world from four billion miles away, a tiny glint of blue in the sharp white light of an ordinary star in the darkness. I want you to try to make out the boundaries of your nation from that vantage point, and fail I want you to feel it, in your bones, in your breath, when two black holes colliding a billion light years away sends a tremor through spacetime that makes every cell in your body stretch, and strain

I want to make you nurse nostalgia for the stars long dead, the ones that fused your carbon nuclei and the ones whose last thermonuclear death throes outshined the entire galaxy to send a single photon into your eye

I want you to live forward but see backward, farther and deeper into the past, because in a relativistic universe you don’t have any other choice. I want the stale billion-year-old starlight of a distant galaxy to be your reward

I want to utterly disorient you and let you navigate back by the stars. I want you to lose yourself, and find it again, not just here, but everywhere, in everything

I want you to believe that the universe is a vast, random, uncaring place, in which our species, our world, has absolutely no significance. And I want you to believe that the only response is to make our own beauty and meaning and to share it while we can

I want to make you wonder what is out there. What dreams may come in waves of radiation across the breadth of an endless expanse. What we may know, given time, and what splendors might never, ever reach us

I want to make it mean something to you. That you are in the cosmos. That you are of the cosmos. That you are born from stardust and to stardust you will return. That you are a way for the universe to be in awe of itself.

This poem had such a profound effect on me as a 12-year-old in quarantine that I recorded it in my own voice in GarageBand and laid Lo-fi beats that I wrote over it.

Returning to the theme of rain mentioned in Brautigan’s poem, I leave you with one of the most famous poems on Earth:

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

— William Carlos WIllams, Physician & Poet, 1923