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"In this unusual and exceptionally interesting work, James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonized science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue." - Edward O. Wilson
Poems about the universe: from the sub-atomic level to the cosmic, from bacteria to complex life and exoplanets.
The physicist Richard Feynman challenged poets to step aside from metaphor and capture the stark magnificence of the universe. Spurred to action, James Thornton opened himself to wonders and dived deep into the intricacies of science.
Let his poetry open your eyes.
Complete with an essay on Poetry and Science.
"In this unusual and exceptionally interesting work, James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonized science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue." - Edward O. Wilson
"A brilliant introduction to the endless wonders of our universe, from quantum levels to the cosmos. It opened my eyes to many marvels and oddities." – Eberhard Fetz, Professor of Physiology, Biophysics, University of Washington
"Poets sometimes flinch at the idea of footnotes. Poems, they think, should be perfect small worlds of their own. The Feynman Challenge upends this aesthetic. Like the Pompidou Centre, it wears all its workings on the outside. Plunging into the sea of scientific knowledge, it comes up grinning and glittering with droplets of lovely information. This is a generous book, happy to serve the curiosity, the wonder and humility of science, happening here and there in words that simply send a shudder -Two black holes are about to marry, a billion years ago - through our sense of time and space." – Philip Gross, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize
Contents
Introduction
Census of deep life
Embodied semantics
Of mice and scorpions
Rumination and forest bathing
A dozen ways to make a living
The future of clouds
The jaguar sometimes bites
Symbiont real estate
Páramos
The apex predator guild
Your inner fish
Tomb blossoms
Long ago and under water
Traumatic matings
Quartet with parasites
The dead fish of Chad
The lodger
Like milkshakes
Hungry daughters
The rolling of the dungball
Head of glass
Fringed with teeth
E.O. Wilson’s favourite ant
Eminent Britons
Aerial wars
Penis Envy
The news about Neanderthals
Conquering Earth
A century of gorging
A bulletin from our branch
Warm wet and quantum
New equilibria
The rules of loss
Spat 1
Chiropterans
Count those lost
Coelacanths among us
Q is for cryptography
Ringdown
The end of time
Too few to fill the sky
Never forget red dwarfs
The biggest star
Cosmonautika
A time will come
By grace of the solar wind
A map of peculiar velocities