The Electric Universe

Apr 11, 2019Jun 6, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

The Electric Universe

I heard about it on the wires –
From out the noise, a brand new spark
That’s causing quite a buzz, it seems,
With those who dare to cross the streams –
The stars are not atomic fires,
They claim, and matter isn’t dark !
Instead, across all empty space
Electrostatic charges race…

The stars are merely filaments
Amid a galaxy of bulbs,
The cosmic pulse, at super-C,
Will form electro-gravity.
Now, many physicists resent
This theory, and the place it holds –
But then, how can they fail to see
The holes in relativity ?

I heard the crackle in the air,
And tuned my head and felt the spike –
For all that maths and physics bore,
I saw at once the metaphor !
The Universe and I must share
In cells and galaxies alike
Electrons – tiny, yet so large –
So much potential in their charge !

Just in time for the first image of a black hole, I learned about a theory of space that denies their existence (also referred to as Plasma Cosmology). As I understand it, it basically posits that (though I’m sure I’m butchering this):

the reason no definitive evidence of black holes or dark matter exists is because they don’t actually exist,

that over 99% of matter in the universe is in a state of plasma, which readily conducts electricity,

that the lack of matter to hold the galaxies together is due to electricity itself amplifying gravity,

And that stars are not nuclear furnaces but more akin to the elements in lightbulbs, that is the places where the Universe’s electric fields ‘discharge’.

But like I say, I’m sure I’ve got that mostly wrong. And I make no claims to its accuracy. What attracted me to it was simply its poetic possibilities.

Dwarf Planet

Mar 15, 2019Jun 7, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Pluto 2 — *Pluto: Ice Mountain Climbing* by Derek Anderson & Joel Anderson

Dwarf Planet

Of course he’s not a planet !
That shouldn’t be disputable.
That shouldn’t make him any less the beautiful,
That shouldn’t make him any less –
His surface is so mutable,
And not the long-expected pockered granite
Of our Earth-restricted guess –
But plains and ridges run instead,
In shades of red,
Across which canyons slice.
And we were right about the ice,
But not the mountains that it forms !
Mountains that could melt away,
Except he never warms at all –
His crystal peaks that should reflect the sun’s weak glow,
Except they’re covered by the nitrogen that falls as snow.

Dwarf perhaps is too pejorative,
But then, if you’ll forgive, he’s not the same,
And after all, it’s just a name.
There is no magic line
Where we can suddenly define
The class of planets from the dwarfs at just below his size –
To let him cling to planet-hood,
But sorry, Eris, all you other guys are just a might too small.
It’s hardly wise to be so arbit’ry in what should get the planet’s call –
It also shows that gravity is quite misunderstood:
For lack of mass is why he swings
In tilted rings around the sun,
And why he’s kept at bay by Neptune’s sway,
In the long, long run:
So no, he’s not a planet, he’s a diff’rent kind of thing –
We know because we’ve seen him: he’s the cosmic Kuiper king.

Out in the Styx

Mar 14, 2019Jun 7, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Out in the Styx

Pluto – the solar system’s Greenland,
Cold and remote, an inbetween land,
As way beyond the horizon he lies.
Infact they are a similar size –
And Charon is Baffin – who watches him sleep,
While facing each other across the deep.
An arctic fox and a polar bear
Of the Kuiper Belt, that pair.
If planets are continents, these two are islands:
So icy and ancient, yet teasingly shy lands.

Their names and status are pure propaganda
The truth, of course, is both lesser and grander –
Fascinating for their own sake,
Despite the islets that clutter their wake.
But here, their orbits must diverge:
As Greenland enters its warming surge,
While his long summer cannot last –
His perihelion has passed.
So into the Hadean depths once more,
Upon the night’s Plutonian shore.

Rocket Roll

Jan 15, 2019Jun 7, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Rocket Roll

To ev’ry band who never hit the heights,
Who play the clubs but never play the halls –
Whose name will never burn in lights,
Nor posters hang from bedroom walls –
Who always watch their fellow dudes a-strut,
And always think “We’re just as good as that !”
Who feel the calling in their gut,
But never feast upon the fat –
You’ve got the amps, you’ve got the tunes,
You’ve got your share of dweebs and loons –
Yet still you only smoulder, never blast.
You missed your chance to quit this town,
It’s gravity that keeps you down.
You’re only growing older and surpassed.

But ev’ry band with unloved riff and chord
Can always hope that Later Times may find
That album ev’ryone ignored,
And bring you forth to futurekind:
To fill the galaxy with your guitars,
And play your ballads on a thousand earths,
And sing your melodies to stars
For centuries beyond your births.
You’ve got the chance, you’ve got the scars,
You’ve got your share of superstars –
So hit the road, and let those thrusters gun.
A soundtrack to the pioneers,
The very music of the spheres,
Could see you flying higher than the sun.

Newton’s Cradle

Dec 25, 2018Jan 27, 2024 ~ Toastingfork ~ 1 Comment

Newton’s Cradle

A child is born in dead of winter,
Child to bring the summer in –
He teases rainbows from the sunshine,
Lets enlightenment begin.
He brings us universal laws –
For as above, then so below.
He shows the path that we must follow,
Teaches how the heavens go.

Brightly shines his star above
In both his eyepiece and his eyes –
His clockwork earth perturbs the sun,
His motion never dies.
He shows us how all things must love –
We all attract and all obey.
So promises the savant one
Who’s born on Christmas Day.

A child is born in dead of winter,
Child to set the world alight –
He mechanises all our fluids,
Magnifies the heavens bright.
He stands atop the giants’ shoulders,
Calculates the cosmic story –
From the leastest fractions upwards,
His the powers and the glory.

He wants to save the human genus
From the couterfeiter’s haul.
Apples are the fruit of learning –
Worlds shall rise to meet their fall.
He shows us how the warmth between us
Never really goes away –
Hark the one who keeps us burning,
Born on Christmas Day.

Many sources cite Isaac as being born on 25th December 1642, while many others claim it was on 4th January 1643. Both are correct. At the time of his birth, the Julian Calandar was still in use in Britain, but the 10-days-ahead Gregorian had been adopted in continental Europe (and more to the point, by the modern audience reading those dates).

Likewise, the day he died can be shown as variously 20th March 1726, 20th March 1727, or 31st March 1727. So, firstly, during his lifespan the Julian had drifted to 11 days out (which accounts for the 31st March reference). And secondly, the official New Year’s Day in England was 25th March, thus 1726 ran from 25th March to 24th March (four days after he died) – but again, this is often retrospectively adjusted (or sometimes half-adjusted, changing the New Year but not the Calandar)

All-in-all, a curious mix-up over a man obsessed with orbits.

Thanks-Giving

Nov 22, 2018May 29, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

sky space dark galaxy — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Thanks-Giving

Let us give our thanks to the universe for hosting us,
Even if it doesn’t even know that’s what it does.
And even if it does, it wouldn’t care that it had made us
When it’s only accidental that its stellar constants aid us;
And anyway, we’re here today – I guess we can’t evade us,
Even though we’re only just-because.
But anyhow, we’re here now, and that’s what really matters:
Neither choked nor gasping, and neither froze nor burned.
But anthro-cosmologic-thought just fills the void and flatters,
For if we ever never were, we wouldn’t know we weren’t.
So thank-you, universe, (not that you care) –
Thank-you just for simply being there.

Area 42

Nov 15, 2018Jun 6, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Area 42

Aliens, aliens,
Somewhere they’re out there !
The odds are so great,
And the physics agrees.
They just need a planet
With temp’rature fair,
With water that’s liquid,
And low stellar breeze.
And who would have thought it,
But when we went looking,
There’s thousands of planets
Just lurking all over.
So down in their oceans,
What might they have cooking ?
Alas, they’re too distant
To send out a Rover.

Ah, but imagine if we could !
Just grab our towels and jelly beans
And stride our cosmic neighbourhood !
If only we could learn the means.
Until such time, it might be wise
To doubt the news, and watch the skies.

Forget about greys
Or a buxom blue femme,
We know they’ll look nothing
Like anything here.
For they’ll be as strange
As must we be to them,
From opposite ends
Of the final frontier.
So let’s not be too harsh
On yoofoo believers
For who knows what’s lurking
Beyond our ken ?
But things are too distant
For radar receivers
To show us the saucers
Of little green men.

Ah, but imagine if they could !
Above high clouds, they’d scrutinise
Our quaint provincial neighbourhood.
Alas, I must dispute your cries.
The only people up there, guys,
Are far outside our lonely skies.

The Voyage of the Novum Organum

Oct 11, 2018Jun 3, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

frontispiece from *Novum Organum Scientiarum* by Francis Bacon, art by anon

The Voyage of the Novum Organum

’Twas in the summer of ’20
When our galleon set sale.
Now gather ye, and plenty,
As I lay the fearless tale:
We soon approached the pillars bold
That Hercules himself, we’re told,
Had planted, so’s to say “Behold !
Behold these sights, and quail !
Here lies the End of the Earth, my friends,
And who knows what may lie beyond ?
It’s time to find what you’re worth, my friends,
If dareꞌst ye leave your pond.
Will you view my gates as a warning ?
Then head for home on the turning tide.
Or will you view my gates as a dawning ?
Then pass on through to the other side !”

Who knows if God shall forsake us ?
Who knows where the currents take us ?
Over the seas on our questing quest:
With our fortunes pressed for the holy grail,
As on and on we sail.

So wise old Captain Bacon
Gave the word to pass on through.
We prayed he weren’t mistaken
And a-gambling with his crew.
We sailed betwixt those ancient piers,
And set a course for new frontiers.
Once Argonauts, now pioneers !
’Twas time to earn our due.
“There lies the Start of the Earth, my friends,
When we find out what lies ahead !
It’s time to give rebirth, my friends,
It’s time to raise the dead !”
We knew great riches would await us,
All our maps were full of exes !
We dug up booty with apparatus,
And unearthed keys to fresh complexes.

Follow the clues, be smart and plucky –
Here be dragons, if we’re lucky !
Over the seas on our questing quest:
The better we guessed, the more we unveiled,
As on and on we sailed.

We plumbed that deep wide ocean
So’s to chart her reefs and bars
The first we found was motion –
It was written in the stars !
Then spied we microscopic forms –
A hidden world of tiny swarms.
We shuddered, but we rode such storms,
And better for the scars.
There lies so much joy on this Earth, my friends –
Let’s find out what we share her with !
There’s nowhere upon her in dearth, my friends –
She’s always more to give !
We sailed upon her seas of numbers,
Fathomed her amounts amounting:
Formulas and patterns slumbered –
Ev’rything, we learned, was counting.

And the point where the limit of our learning meets,
There’s always a fair wind filling our sheets.
Over the seas on our questing quest:
The more we professed, the more we regaled,
As on and on we sailed.

The further out our striving,
So the better stocked our stores.
And always we’re arriving
Onto ever-stranger shores.
And on those lands we took our drills
And tapped the streams and dug the hills
And set down bridges, rails and mills,
And just and noble laws.
We learned how the whole of the Earth, my friends,
Is built from the same few blocks, not more !
We learned how the life round her girth, my friends,
Is built from life before !
We sailed away to explore and learn,
And still there is so much more to find !
We know we can never again return
To that ancient world that we left behind.

We’ll never be bored and we’ll never be done –
We’ll never arrive at the setting sun.
Over the seas on our questing quest:
The more we progress, the higher we scale,
As on and on we sail.

Skywriting

Aug 21, 2018Jun 3, 2022 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Skywriting

Infact, they both used pencils
Up until Nineteen Sixty-Seven,
When a privately-researched pen was announced
And NASA and Cosmonauts quickly renounced
Those flammable, lead-shedding pencils –
Americans first, with Apollo 7.
They should be so proud, that commie space-guys
Are writing with Yankee-most free-enterprise.

Star-Glazing

Aug 6, 2018Nov 16, 2025 ~ Toastingfork ~ Leave a comment

Richard Feynman giving a lecture on the motion of planets around the Sun

Star-Glazing

(After Walt Whitman)

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer,
When the proofs and figures were ranged
In columns before me, to add and measure,
When shown his charts and diagrams strange,
When I, sitting, heard the Astronomer,
Where he lectured with much applause,
How soon, tired and sick, I stirred
And wander’d off by myself outdoors.
There in mystical moist night-airs,
From time to time I look’d up clear
In perfect silence at the stars,
(And thought them small, and rather near.)

This is my take on Walt Whitman’s poem of the opening line. I’ve shuffled things around and made it rhyme, but most of it is his words except for the last line. Turns out he was just a luddite after all.