Begin by composing a poem. This is harder than it sounds so allow due time. When you’re ready, test your poem on the grand canvas of nature by conducting the following simple science experience—be alert for the unexpected.
1. Weigh you poem. Quote you answers in newtons. Calculate how much your poem would weigh if you wrote it on the moon.
2. Graph your poem. Choose what you like for your x- and y-axes but don’t plot “love” vs. “anger” if you really mean “satisfaction” vs. “dread.” Be mindful of the units you choose. (What, after all, are the quanta of “delight”?) Examine your graph. Is there a correlation? A trend? It might help to read some Emily Dickinson for Clues on how to Navigate among an Infinity of Conclusions and Interpret your Results.
3. Cut your poem into the smallest bits you can and examine them under a high-powered microscope. What is your poem made of? Is it made of miniscule poem atoms or something more fundamental? Write a report on your findings. Include you speculation on whether the world is made of poetry or something more fundamental.
4. Write your poem out on one line and measure its length in centimeters (for these experiments, it’s best to use the Metric System, for obvious reasons). If a single atom is about one ten billionth of a metre wide, about how many atoms fit side by side in your poem? With a nod to Lucretius and The Nature of Things, write a treatise on the significance of poetry, atoms and the Void. If you can, use his famous quote, “Nothing can be created from nothing.”
5. Light your poem on fire and examine the gases it emits with a spectroscope. Do the elements that exist in your poem exist in other poems too? That is, do all poems have the same emission spectrum? Should they?
6a. Crumple your poem into a small ball and drop it from a height of two meters. Measure how long it takes to fall. Calculate the acceleration due to gravity and quote your answer in meters per second squared. Use this result and the radius of the Earth to calculate the mass of the Earth with Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. You have just used poetry to determine the mass of an astronomical body—even Whitman never did that!
6b. From the weight of your poem (experiment 1) and the acceleration due to gravity of the Earth (experiment 6a), calculate the mass (m) of your poem. If you could convert your poem’s mass directly into energy (E) using Einstein’s equation, E=mc2 (where c is the speed of light), how much energy would be released? Decide whether this is enough to satisfy the world’s energy demands—what would it take to power the world with poetry?
7. Test Galileo’s legendary Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment by dropping you (still-crumpled) poem together with one of the great epics of the past, such as The Odyssey or The Aeneid. Do all poems fall at the same rate? Consider air resistance as a metaphor for the unseen forces that tug on the individual words and phrases of your poem. Does it affect the two poems equally?
8. Rewrite your poem so that it is devoid of any references to time’s passing. Can you infer from your new poem that time does not exist? See if you can develop this inference (perhaps with assistance from Eliot’s Four Quartets) into a full-fledged scientific theory. Maybe you’ll revolutionize modern physics.
9. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity applies to the universe as a whole and if your poem has universal themes it could provide valuable insights into curved spacetime, black holes, dark energy and other cosmic enigmas. Look into it.
10. Take you poetic bits (experiment 3) and fire them through a double-slit apparatus. Verify that, rather than a pile-up behind each slit, you observe an interference pattern of alternating light and dark bands (an obvious metaphor for wonder and mystery). Your poem is thus obeying the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. No one knows how to link quantum mechanics and general relativity (experiment 9) and if you can you’ve gone beyond the universality of poetry and created promising steps toward a Theory of Everything. The Holy Grail of science could soon be within reach! Write up your results and submit them to Science vs. Nature. Give your paper a sexy title, such as, Toward a Theory of Everything Through Poetry.
When you’re ready, compose a new poem.
(Source: people.bu.edu)
• Poetry • Lit • Long Reads • Daniel Hudon • link •