Cosmos: A Poem

Conversation in Faculty Commons

33 CONVERSATION IN FACULTY COMMONS for Berndt Mueller He is slender, intellectual, his accent Austrian—a cosmic theorist. I studied physics formerly, loved astronomy as a boy. Among faculty colleagues, we talk across salads, in words like these: “So you think the first universe primordial—violent—unconscious?” “Yes,” I answer. “Polyphemus, in the painting by Turner.” “Oh,” he says. “The giant that Odysseus blinded. Then unwisely derided. But why this cosmos without sight?” “Because—” I pause. “Withholding light. Dark at first. Don’t you recall describing to me the first fireball?” “Yes, I remember. It was the first time we met.” “You made me imagine the initial zero. The nothing. The empty O.” “Yes.” He pauses. “I recall that you brightened to hear of the release of light.” “For three hundred and eighty thousand years,” you told me, “no light appears.” 34 “Yes. But why invoke the Cyclops at the beginning of the universe?” “Thinking of origin-unity, I imagined this being, of only one eye.” “But I thought that we equally sought descriptions without mythology.” “I start with the earliest instant,” I say, “in darkness. Then the birth of light.” “So your energy-god—not even a head— is a blind eyeball instead?” “My bodiless giant states the paradox: light in dark, order in violence. I need to dramatize the event your numbers realize.” “Very well. Go ahead. Poetize.” “The universe begins as a point. The first tight sphere of heat withholds its light, like an in-turned eyeball foreseeing all, and finally evolving sight.” “You mean in the release of light,” he says. “I accept this poetic mistake. Early on, the fireball was opaque.” 35 “Then it reached a critical boundary, cooling, and the universe began to see.” “No,” he says, sipping coffee. “Not exactly. The fireball underwent a phase-transition, reaching a temperature where atoms form. Then light shone free, this one early time.” “If licensed to be poetical,” I say, “light is like embodied thought— beautiful, transiently real. Physically immaterial.” “Well. Light is a materialized energy. Photons form, in the breaking symmetry. Light responds, slightly, to the curvature of gravity.” “Did the freezing of energy, into material form, create all space and time?” He considers. “Spacetime arose spontaneously, with the outward, cooling momentum of energy.” “If matter and energy are one,” I ask, “inter-convertible, why is the direction of time one-way—from unity to separation?” “That is, perhaps, a theological question— whereon physicists should have no opinion.” “So the universe remains mysterious. We arise from its violent histories. 36 Art balances on the precarious edge.” “Singing of the precipice,” he says. “You poets are in love with chaos.” “We imagine a different consciousness— thought-feeling, in a rough embrace.” “Yes,” he agrees. “Yet order arose with creation.” “Cosmology supplies a beginning— an uncanny one, without meaning.” “Physics doesn’t deal in opinion. There is theory, experiment—and verification.” “So unity fell into successive separations.” “We prefer to say, into forces and actions.” “Plotinus speaks of emanations.” “Physics inspires more confidence 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 time-world emerges from eternity— the limited, from infinity.” 37 He frowns, then shrugs. “We 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 think of it as a first star,” I say. “But containing all others. And far, far away in time.” “But how sublime,” I say. “Supremely violent, within exquisite parameters,” he adds. “Those elemental constants that you mentioned once?” “Yes,” he says, “of course. The force and mass of the universe, in their almost-perfected balance.” I sigh. “My elementary physics lesson. Begin with proton and electron.” “Electromagnetic force binds electron to the nucleus negative to positive.” “So,” I say, “and that is how we live.” 38 “Yes,” he smiles. “With exactly the energy, so that atoms interact chemically.” “So that plants, in photosynthesis, 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.” “You look very pleased with yourself,” he says, pleasantly. “You simplify a very great complexity. Such stuff is part of a feel-good...