Tag: Sunday Poem

Czesław Miłosz’s “This World” (1994)

It’s a question you’ve certainly heard before – the laws of physics work just fine when you run time backwards, so why, in the real world, does time only go forwards?

Run a movie backwards, and what you see could never happen in real life: a diver never leaps feet first out of the pool onto the board, while drops of water fling themselves back in. But, as Richard Feynman explained, at the level of atoms and molecules, there is no reason why running the film backward should be absurd – our laws of physics say time is reversible at the microscopic level. Feynman argued that time’s forward motion was a macroscopic phenomenon, rooted in the universe’s relentless increase in entropy. Physicist Lee Smolin has pursued a similar (but in many ways a radically different) idea – the forward flow of time is a consequence of a network of relationships in the universe. He may be right, but for the time being, why time is not reversible is still a deep mystery.

Physics isn’t the only place where reversibility appears to be a mystery. Why isn’t life reversible? Aging and death seem inevitable for us individually, but with each birth, the clock is reset. Biological time is reversed. How is that possible?

We don’t really know. Before your children are born you age twenty, thirty, or forty years. Your DNA has been copied and recopied, accumulating damage, telomeres have shortened, and your cells are on the way towards senescence, and yet each newborn gets a fresh start. Amazingly, each successive generation of children is not born ever more prematurely aged. If the clock can be reset for our germ cells, why can’t we reverse biological time in the rest of our cells? Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: The Irreversibility of Time”

Robert Frost’s “A Loose Mountain” (1942)

A Balearic slinging competition, as I learned from slinging.org, involves slinging rocks at an iron disk fastened to the center of a board. In “A Loose Mountain,” Frost suggests that the Earth may be the target of a cosmic slinging game played with loose mountains instead of small stones, and that the major contestant, the Outer Black, is just waiting for the perfect shot.

Frost plays on the tension between our remarkable achievements as a species and our apparent insignificance in the universe. We can stand outside and ooh and aah over the incineration of high velocity rocks during the Leonid meteor shower, and then walk back inside, out of the night and into our well-lit homes, no longer at the mercy of the diurnal cycle. And yet there is no reason we can’t be snuffed out with one well-placed asteroid, just like the dinosaurs.

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Defying the Outer Black”

Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist” (1966)

In honor of Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who died Friday, we’re reading “Death of a Naturalist”, from Heaney’s first poetry collection.

As the old cliché goes, children are natural scientists, and of those who do grow up to be professional scientists, their childhood obsessions reveal what kind they’ll become. Physicists grow up tinkering with radio sets (or more recently, computers), while biologists roam the woods catching frogs and snakes, or in Darwin’s case, beetles. There are exceptions, of course (and in fact, I suspect that childhood obsessions poorly predict career outcomes), but Edward O. Wilson’s childhood pursuit of venemous snakes in the Alabama swamps fits the cliché:

A swamp filled with snakes may be a nightmare to most, but for me it was a ceaselessly rotating lattice of wonders. I had the same interest in the diversity of snakes that other 15-year-old boys seemed automatically to develop in the years and makes of automobiles. And knowing them well, I had no fear. On each visit I found something new. I captured live specimens, brought them home to cages I had constructed of wood and wire mesh, and fed them frogs and minnows I collected at the hatchery.

Even after a nearly lethal encounter with a Cottonmouth as big as he was, Wilson was not deterred, and he grew up to be a renowned naturalist. Not so the boy in Heaney’s poem, whose shocking first encounter with unsentimentalized biology ends his budding career as a naturalist. Instead, he becomes a great poet. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: People Are Organisms Too”