As a science writer, I spend a lot of time worrying about how to make my words simultaneously accurate and accessible. Most of the time, that’s things like correctly explaining the concept of space-time – the idea that space and time are a single, joint phenomenon – without using any equations. This physicist is hunting for the biggest black hole in the universe In the work of cosmology, there is also the element of awe.
All my training teaches me to try to awe my audience. Look at the cosmos in all its glory! But the political pressures I face also teach me that I need to explain why looking at the cosmos in all its glory is practically useful.
Suddenly, I feel responsible for making the case that it’s valuable to humanity to know things about the cosmos. There are many ways into this. For example, we often hear that we are carbon-based life forms.
Carbon exists in the cosmos because compact balls of hydrogen heated up and became dense enough for nuclear fusion to begin. Which is to say, stars formed, and carbon is a by-product of a star. We are made of star stuff,” the astronomer Carl Sagan famously said.
There is a kind of risk of looking at the cosmos through ourselves, though. Queen Victoria’s poet laureate Alfred Tennyson noticed this early on while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. While there, Tennyson composed a bitingly satirical poem, making fun of another student, A Character, which begins: With a half-glance upon the skyAt night he said, ‘The wanderingsOf this most intricate infinite UniverseTeach me the nothingness of things.’ On my first careless read, I thought this was a nice entry point to the cosmos, this most intricate infinite universe, which teaches us how small and fleeting we are.
At first, I didn’t notice “With a half-glance”, which suggests the looker is doing so carelessly. I only realised the direction the poem was going in when I got a few more lines in: He spake of beauty: that the dullSaw no divinity in grass,Life in dead stones, or spirit in air; As I read these three lines, I found myself nodding: yes, yes. I have crossed paths with people who talk about beauty but have no sense of style and only see our planetary home as something to pillage, rather than a wonder to honour.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
