Radiolab - Universe In Verse

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

For a special New Year’s treat, we take a tour through the history of the universe with the help of… poets. Our guide is Maria Popova, who writes the popular blog The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), and the poetry is from her project, “The Universe in Verse” — an annual event where poets read poems about science, space, and the natural world. Special thanks to all of our poets, musicians, and performers: Marie Howe, Tracy K. Smith, Rebecca Elson, Joan As Police Woman, Patti Smith, Gautam Srikishan, Zoe Keating, and Emily Dickinson. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Lulu Millerwith help from - Maria PopovaProduced by - Sindhu Gnanasambandanwith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Natalie A. Middletonand Edited by  - Pat Walters FURTHER READING AND RESEARCH:To dig deeper on this one, we recommendBooks: - Tracy K Smith’s “Life On Mars” (https://zpr.io/weTzGTbZyVDT)- Marie Howe’s “The Kingdom Of Ordinary Times” (https://zpr.io/Tj9cWTsQxHG3)- Rebecca Elson’s “A Responsiblity To Awe” (https://zpr.io/PLR3KL8SfuPR)- Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” (https://zpr.io/zM47P5KqqKZx)Music:- Joan As Policewoman (https://joanaspolicewoman.com/)- Gautam Srikishan (https://www.floatingfast.com/)- Zoe Keating (https://www.zoekeating.com/) Internet:- The Marginalian blog post (https://zpr.io/abTuDFH9pfwu) about Vera Rubin- Check out photos of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium (https://zpr.io/XkgTscKBfem6), a book of 424 flowers she picked and pressed and identified while studying the wild botany of Massachusetts.Tracy K. Smith, “My God, It’s Full of Stars” from Such Color: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith. Read by the author and used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.Fun fact: This episode was inspired by the fact that many Navy ships record the first log entry of the New Year in verse! To see some of this year's poems and learn about the history of the tradition, check out this post by the Naval History and Heritage Command. And, if you want to read a bit from Lulu's interview with sailor poet Lt. Ian McConnaughey, subscribe to our newsletter. Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. Door listening. Door listening. To radio lab.

Radio lab. From WNYC. WNYC. Okay, so Latif. Yes. Hello. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you.

We are now just a few days into a brand new year. Yes, hello. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. We are now just a few days into a brand new year. And think about what that means. We have all completed a 500 million mile plus lap around the sun. And so in honor of completing that journey, I wanted to try something a little different today and take us all on a journey. Okay.

We're going to travel all the way back to the very beginning of all of it. And then we're going to zip forward and make pit stops at certain moments in the development of universe and planet. And to do that to really understand what's going on scientifically, we are going to turn to poets. Hmm. Do you even like poetry? What are your feelings about poetry? No, I generally dislike poetry. And why? Why?

I think that, like, okay, I just, for circumstances that are too complicated to even go into, I recently just had to read a book of poems and write about it a little bit. Yeah. And I was like, for all I can tell, this is just like an AI random word generator. It does not make me feel anything except stupid. And it's just like I'm like, like what is the point of what we're doing here?

Well, can I offer some assurance and consolation for that? Please. This, by the way, is going to be our lovely guide on this poetry journey. Her name is Maria Popova. She's a writer. You've probably heard of her website used to be called brainpickings now, the marginalian. And she curated this journey of poems that we're about to hear,

but it turns out she herself has incredibly mixed feelings about poetry. So first I'll say, I personally like maybe one percent of the poetry, we're like, okay. Poetry was not a part of my life for most of my adult life,

and I really discounted it. But then she read this T.S. Eliot poem and she said it disturbed her universe. I saw this way it has of slipping in through the backdoor of consciousness past our intellectual judgments and open up this other portal of receptivity. So she started doing this event where she would have poets read poems about science. The universe in verse. I've never been to the event myself,

but I've listened to the poems over the years, and some of them have really moved me. So today, for this special treat for the new year, I asked Maria to curate a little journey for us from the very beginning of the universe to a kind of future, a glimpse of the beyond. All right. So, okay, let's turn the key in our time travel machine and we're going to go back to our first stop.

And this is a moment before the Big bang, the explosion that supposedly many argue made our universe. Theoretical physicists continue to debate what was happening and if the big bang happened and what was really there before and below, but at the time of the poem, there was a belief that what existed before the big bang was something called the singularity. Okay, so that's what this poem is going to be about before we hear it. for the big bang was something called the singularity. Okay, so that's what this poem is gonna be about before we hear it.

Maria, can you just explain as best you can what the singularity is? Everything that ever existed could have once been compressed into the single point, single point. You know, this kind of totality shrunken into nothingness that contains everything. A compact little everything. Okay, so the poem that we are going to hear is called The Singularity

and it is written and performed by Marie Howe. True to play it. Let's do it. Let's do it. She walks up to the stage and here's what we hear. Let me think. When I was talking with Maria about doing something this evening, I just jotted something in my journal, really. I told her I wanted to read Walt Whitman, but I just sort of sent this thing to,

and she said, oh, read that, read that. And I said, I don't know. Usually I wait about 10 years before I read anything out loud. And this has been about a week. Anyway, I don't know anything about science. I've tried to read these books. My daughter, however, loves physics. I don't understand that.

But I was trying to get her to explain to me what the singularity is. And I was reading Hawkins, of course. And then I was trying to read astrophysics for people in a hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I said to her a few weeks ago, I don't believe in the big bang. And she said, you don't, I said no.

It's impossible. Who here really believes that we were all, everything that ever is was once singularity, so dense, it was one thing before it blew up. Raise your hands. Right? See, just like not that many over there. So here it is, the singularity.

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were. So compact, nobody needed a bed or food or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom, our home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember? There was no nature, no them, no tasks to determine if the elephant grieves her calf, or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don't speak English, or farceyarsi or French.

Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean. And before that, when Earth was sky, an animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all. Nothing before we came to believe humans were so important. Before this awful loneliness. Can molecules remember it? What once was before anything happened?

Can our molecules remember? No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb, no noun yet, but only a tiny tiny tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is is is is all everything home. Oh, everything. Home. Thank you. That line, can our molecules remember it, is the line that gets me in that one where I'm just like, well crap, if the singularity's right, they were in there, right? Or the hint of them, right? I also love how that line echoes that quote from Whitman, which is in the beginning of the poem, that iconic every atom belonging to me is good belongs to you.

And she says, remember? This idea of the singularity, that everything everywhere, both of those ease being capitalized, all was in one dot. Like it's so absurd when you think about it, it's like the most absurd possible thing. It's just like one of those things, it's like,

oh yeah, like anything could have ever happened. Yeah, well I think that's the gift of the poem, though, that it names so plainly what we experience as common sense. It is no litmus test for reality. The reality is so much larger than our creaturely perceptions and intuitions. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so stop, too. Here we go. Bye-bye, singularity. Bye bye. Big bang. We're zooming forward 9.2 billion years. I should yada yada 9.2 billion years. A planet has formed. We and eventually we'll call it Earth. Woo woo woo. Earth keeps laughing. The sun. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Interestingly, billions of years ago, years weren't longer, but the days were shorter.

Weird. How many days were there in here? I don't know, don't ask me any follow-up questions. Okay, then we go, boor, boor, boor, boor, boor. More and more life is getting supported. We get plankton and mollusks and snails and sharks and dinosaurs. And then from what we can see in the fossil record, there is an explosion of sorts all over the planet. What is it? What happened?

Flowers appeared and carbonated the world so rapidly that Darwin called it an abominable mystery. Abominable flowers. Abominable mystery. A word. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more.

A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more.

A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more.

A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. A bobbin of a bit more. or economics, depending on how we look at it. But what happened was that once there were flowers, they were fruit. And once there were fruit, then plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade, sweetness for a lift to my mate.

And it was a kind of love relationship to biological entities finding each other and something of beauty transpiring between them. Mm. And the young German marine biologist Ernst Heikl gave that interdependence a name. He called it ecology after the Greek oricus or house. House?

That's the root of ecology. House? Our home, home planet. Now this was in 1866. and now we're getting to the poem because it was written in 1865, so that's a year before Ernst Hegel coined the term ecology. But it's really a poem capturing the notion, the concept of ecology through the lens of a single flower.

And it was written by a poet who was a keen and passionate observer of the House of Life. Emily Dickinson. Right. And for the universe-inverse performance, obviously Emily Dickinson wasn't available, so you had a musician perform this poem as a song. But before we hear that, can you just actually read the poem in your own voice real quick, Maria? Yes, because in the song, it's harder to tell the words apart. It's a little harder. Yeah, this one is known as Bloom. Bloom is a result to meet a flower and casually glance.

What cause ones, carelessly suspect, the minor circumstance, assisting in the bright affair, so intricately done, then offered as a butterfly to the meridian, to pack the bud, oppose the worm, obtain its right of dew, adjust the heat,

elude the wind, escape the prowling bee, great nature, not to disappoint awaiting her that day to be a flower is profound responsibility. Yeah, I don't know. Like I like the first one. This one I'm not sure I really get it if I'm being honest. Okay. like the first one? This one, I'm not sure I really get it if I'm being honest. Like, I like the idea that it's like from the point of view of the flower

and you're like, it's actually like kind of dramatic. It's like a big, this is, I'm understanding it. Tell me if I'm getting it wrong. No, great. And maybe there's no getting poems wrong or whatever. Well, also if you're not confused by Emily Dickinson, you're like not doing it right. Okay, great, great, remember, whatever. Well, also, if you're not confused by Emily Dickinson, you're not doing it right.

OK, great, excellent, excellent. OK, so I get that part, like a little action movie, about a flower having to debut, and it's not easy. And then the part at the end, why is being a flower a profound responsibility? So I mean, think about the time she lived in. These were Victorian times. And in Victorian times, flowers of course appeared very much in poetry and art, but they were always these pretty objects. They were objects for admiration. They were not really living things, much less interconnected living things. And here comes Emily Dickinson and composes this poem

that looks at a single flower and everything that goes into making its bloom possible. All the pollinators in the air and the worms in the soil, the animals competing for resources, aiding each other, the natural around it. And the flower suddenly emerges not as an object, but as a system. But yeah, I also think, yeah, if I had encountered this on my own in a book, I would have been

like, but your preamble and the context of Emily Dickinson's close looking and kind of fathoming an ecology before the word ecology was even around the interdependence interconnection. It makes me now walk around and see flowers as like not soft and feathery, but these like keystone, these rock hard strong thing. I love that. Like, I feel kind of grateful and bad for that.

Alright, well with that new understanding of flowers with us, thanks to poetry, we are going to take a short break in. When we come back, we are going to get a new understanding of invisible matter all around us. And wilder, still, we might even get lot if you actually like a poem. Good luck. This, by the way, is the performance of Emily Dickinson's Bloom by musician Joan as policewoman. Then all things that matter find To know it in

To try to go But move on And tell me what you should I do And just think About it again This game Is a proud and big This guy's a grownl of me. Lulu.

What's this? Radio lab. Okay, should we zoom? Alright. Alright, alright, alright. So we started before time itself existed, and then we zoomed forward through the formation of the Earth, animals, flowers, next step.

Stop three. We're zooming ahead a bunch more million years. Humans show up. They start stomping around and making fires and inventing things and trying to perceive things. And we're gonna hear a poem about a discovery that was made in the somewhat recent times of 1978. But to get ourselves all warmed up to understand it,

we're gonna head back to the 1800s because you unearthed this hidden chain of scientists influencing each other over time that resulted in this discovery of hidden matter and then in the writing of the poem itself. So the first person in this chain is... Mariah Mitchell. Right.

She was this amazing Quaker woman, young girl, on the island of Nantucket. And she fell in love with astronomy and watching an annular eclipse. Then every night she would climb up that narrow wooden steps to the roof of their house in her long quaker gown, hauling the brass telescope, and rain or shine or snow or freeze. She would, as they say, sweep the heavens. So, you know, sweep, going sweep, go side by side with the telescope that's with the term is go side by side across the night sky to cover basically the whole region of the

visible sky. Just to see what's up. And one evening, October 1847, she slipped out of the family dinner and went up on the roof. And there was the comment. The King of Denmark had given this gold medal for whoever finds it and she was only 29 years old. How did they know it was there if they had a she had it? I mean, it was for whoever finds a telescopic comment. And that established her first of all is America's great scientific celebrity. She would go on to sort of tour the world and ended up teaching what essentially became

the first class of astrophysicists in the world because she introduced a mathematically rigorous curriculum that even the men at Harvard didn't have. And now we call this astrophysics. And those were the first astrophysicists in the world. It happened. They were all women. Wow. I didn't know that part. Okay. So then basically about 110 years after she's born. Another woman is born. A little girl. A little girl in DC is reading a children's book about Mariah Mitchell. And this little girl is looking out her window into the night sky and suddenly thinks, oh my god, there are people who do this for a living. And I could do this for a living as a girl. And that little girl grew up to be the great Vera Rubin, the astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter. That's what our poem

is going to be about. Dark matter. Dark matter. Trying to perceive it or it being there. But there's one more person in this string, the person who actually wrote the poem, who in her day job was a scientist. She was born in 1960, who is that? Her name was Rebecca Elson, and she was one of the first astronomers tasked with studying Hubble images, particularly an image of the Milky Way in order to study the dark matter halo surrounding it. And she was this incredible person who was only 29 when she received a terminal diagnosis with a very rare kind of blood cancer. And when she died, she left behind 56 scientific papers, which is an extraordinary number for a lifetime.

Right. And this slender splendid book of poems that has a title that to me is the meaning of life. I mean, that's what we're here for. It's titled a responsibility to awe, a responsibility to all or to awe, awe, awe, ha, a, yes. All right. So we are going to hear one of the poems from this collection. or to, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, yes. All right, so we are going to hear one of the poems from this collection.

It's called Let There Always Be Light, Searching for Dark Matter. And I guess before we do, can you explain dark matter? Real quick, it is matter comprising the vast majority of the universe that interacts with gravity but doesn't interact with light. So it's stuff.

It's stuff, but we can't see it. Now we have this poem by Rebecca Elson and who is going to read it for us. We are going to hear the wonderful Patty Smith. With the Patty Smith or just a Patty Smith. The Patty Smith. Wow. Okay, here we go. Let there always be light searching for dark matter. For this we go out dark nights searching out dark nights searching for the dimest stars, for signs of unseen things, to weigh us down, to stop the universe from rushing on and on into its own beyond till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,'s last star going out.

Whatever they turn out to be, let there be swarms of them. Enough for immortality. Always a star where we can warm ourselves. Let there be enough to bring it back from its own edges, to bring us all so close that we ignite the bright spark of resurrection. What do you guys hear in it? What does it make you think about? There was that great book recently by Katie Mack. I think her name is about the end of the universe. And she writes that two of the possible ways the universe will end

is either like everything will keep expanding and expanding till everything like chills itself to death or the idea is it's like, is it gonna expand at some point? And then at some point it's gonna contract and then it's gonna all go into this like big bang and that. Like back into a singularity kind of? Back into a singularity. Well, that's what I was gonna say. This is so great. It takes us back to this mystery this like big bang and back into a singularity. Back into singularity. Well, that's what I was going to say. This is so great.

It takes us back to this mystery of the big bang in this mirror image, like what's on the other side of everything, the other nothingness. Is there another something this? Right. That's right. But also think about it, this is a dying woman writing this poem. I mean, even a hard materialist like me,

like, you know, a lot of scientists who think, you know, we die in that said, the atoms go back into the swirl of atoms and that's that. But somehow we live with this open question, but what's there, you know, what happens, what actually happens. Yeah. And it's like this wish wish like it I I find it sad But maybe this is my misread

But I find it like almost like a foolish wish like How would there be warmth Out of the darkness and the lack of energy it based on her training isn't that Mm, out of the darkness and the lack of energy. Based on her training, isn't that exactly not how it works? I hear that, but I think she's doing something else, which is, I think this is her playful way of saying, this light we live in, live with, it's great, it's enough, appreciated while you're not dying, because we are dying all the time. We are little universes running out of fuel, each of us. And actually, the bright star of resurrection

is this right here, right now, the only one we have. We're in, but we're going to sneak in one last stop, so zooming ahead, another 10 years and a foo, foo, foo, foo, ten years in a little bit. After the discovery of dark matter, there is a shiny, brand new instrument poised to let us look deeper into space than we have ever seen. For our last poem, you chose one by the brilliant poet, Laureate Tracy K. Smith that is about the Hubble telescope. On which her dad worked. Yeah, that's so cool. So he worked like building it, helping to make it. Yeah, he was an engineer on it. He was one of NASA's first black engineers. That's so cool. She made a beautiful book called Life on Mars that actually won her the Pulitzer Prize. that actually won her the Pulitzer Prize. And this poem we're going to hear is called My God It's Full of Stars.

My God It's Full of Stars. Okay, here we go. When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said they operated like surgeons, scrubbed and sheathed in papery green, the room a clean cold and bright white. He'd read Larry Niven at home and drink scotch on the rocks, his eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years when we lived with our finger on the button and struggled to view our enemies as children.

My father spent whole seasons bowing before the Oracle I, hungry for what it would find. His face lit up whenever anyone asked and his arms would rise as if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending night of space. On the ground we tied postcards to balloons for peace. Prince Charles married Lady Die. Rock Hudson died. We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred. And I felt ashamed for all the cheerful engineers, my father, and his tribe. The second time, the optics jived. We sought the edge of all there is. So brutal and alive, it seemed to comprehend us back. I know we should wrap up, but lot of do you have last um yeah my last this is a very beautiful poem and in a way I think out of all of them it's really like the most honest one, because I feel like so much of this, and so much of science in a way,

is like an exercise to know things that are not our scale. Like it's like before we were born, or after we're dead, or too small, or too big, or too far away, or too, like tut tut tut tut, like it's just like not in our scale. Like a lot of these other problems were like, it's like, okay, let's like think about the world

through a flower's perspective. But this is like very honestly, from one human about another human who happens to be the human, who help make her, and I don't know, there's just something very beautiful about this and human. and human. Music Alright friends, that'll do it. Happy New Year.

Happy completion of the giant millions of miles lap to all. Yeah, happy New Year. Biggest thanks to Maria Popova. If you want to go deeper on some of these poems, she recently got a bunch of them animated in such a thoughtful and stirring way. Just Google Universe Inverse. This episode is produced by Sindooyan Asambandam.

Special thanks to all of the poets, musicians and performers. Tracy K. Smith, Marie Howe, Rebecca Elson, Joan as policewoman, Patty Smith, Gouthrom Shrikishan, Zoe Keating, and Emily Dickinson. Hope you have a good one. Or if you don't, that you go and write a poem about it. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abelman and is edited by Swarim Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-host. Dylan Keef is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brustler, Rachel Q. Sick, A Keti Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna,

David Gable, Maria Pasco, T.R.S, Sindu Nanna Sanban Down, Matt Q.T., Anime Q.N. Alex Nissen, Sara Cari, Anna Rusquette Pas, Sousa Sandbag, Ariana Wack, Pat Walter, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vignales, our fact checkers by Diane Kelly, Emily Krueger, and Natalie Metalton.

Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm calling from Coachester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Coaches and Betsy Moore Foundation. Science Sandbox, same on Foundation Initiative, and the John Tambleton Foundation. Foundation on Support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred Pee's Note Foundation. Foundation Initiative and the John Tambottam Foundation. Foundation Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P.S. No. Foundation.