String Theory

     String Theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to explain, among other things, quantum gravity.  Its basic elements are open and closed strings -- rather than point-like particles.  The poem "String Theory" by Ronald Wallace offers imaginative and thoughtful interplay between these strings of theoretical physics and the strings of musical instruments -- I found the poem at the VerseDaily website and Wallace has given me permission to use it here.

      String Theory     by Ronald Wallace

      I have to believe a Beethoven
      string quartet is not unlike
      the elliptical music of gossip:
      one violin excited
      to pass its small story along  

Galileo in Florence

Poetry found in the words of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642):

"Philosophy is written in this grand book,
the universe, which stands continually
open to our gaze. 

But the book cannot be understood unless one first 
learns to comprehend the language and read the letters
in which it is composed.

It is written in the language of mathematics,

A scientist writes of scientists

     Wilkes-Barre poet Richard Aston is many-faceted -- a teacher, an engineer, a textbook author, a technical writer.  And Aston writes of those whose passion he admires-- in his latest collection, Valley Voices (Foothills Publishing, 2012) we meet laborers, many of them miners from the Wyoming Valley where he makes his home.  Aston also writes of scientists and mathematicians -- and he has given permission for me to offer below his poems that feature Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei.  With the mind of a scientist and the rhythms of poetry, Aston brings to us clear visions of these past lives.

Scientist     by Richard Aston

It took more than a figure, face, skin, and hair
for me to become Marie Curie,
wife of simple, smiling, selective, Pierre
who could recognize — because he was one — my genius.

On shoulders of giants . . .

     Washington, DC is a city rich with both poetry and mathematics.  Last Tuesday evening I attended a Mathematical Association of America (MAA) lecture by author and math historian William Dunham (whom I knew when he taught for a bunch of years at Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College, in Eastern Pennsylvania, not so far from my employer, Bloomsburg University).  Dunham spoke of insights gained by many hours reading the correspondence of British mathematician and scientist, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727).  The discoverer of "gravity,"  and, moreover, both a genius and a disagreeable man.  Still, Newton was a man who gave a nod to his predecessors, "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants."

Spacetime

   Spacetime     by Miroslav Holub (1932-1998)

   When I grow up and you get small,
   then --