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Although technically the UK is a Christian country, many people do not subscribe to a religion or if they do, they aren't particularly spiritual. For those that prefer to keep their wonder within in the realms of the physical world (vast as it is!), these readings based on science or even written by scientists, might be more fitting! I had a lot of fun choosing music for this month's radio show as well since there are so many different styles that focus on science. We start off quite classical and then move into some contemporary electronic ambient.
Quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically.
To the earth, chemically.
To the rest of the universe atomically.
Sonnet—To Science By Edgar Allen Poe
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
Summer and Austin have left their apartment for a house By Romie Stott
I meant to write a poem for your wedding
about super fluids. About quantized groupings
whose singular momentum pushes up and over containers –
about transmission of heat, creation of vortices,
the creation of h/m proportions of vortices
where h is plank’s constant –
a spun bucket that holds a dozen whirlpools.
I meant to write that you were aligned together
in the same quantum state,
and could not be contained. I meant to write
a poem of matter, of transition points –
of energy that transforms liquid to gas –
of boiling water at a steady temperature
as molecules leap into vapor.
They don’t use the term latent heat anymore.
I can’t use it to say you’ve changed states.
It was a long time building, only seeming
the same, like boiling water, as you transformed
into something that rises.
“Vows” from Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness by Tony Kushner
Conjunction, assemblage, congress, union:
Life isn’t meant to be lived alone.
A life apart is a desperate fiction.
Life is an intermediate business:
a field of light bordered by love
a sea of desire stretched between shores.
Marriage is the strength of union.
Marriage is the harmonic blend.
Marriage is the elegant dialectic of counterpoint.
Marriage is the faultless, fragile logic of ecology:
A reasonable process of give and take
unfolding through cyclical and linear time.
A wedding is the conjoining of systems in which
Neither loses its single splendour and both are completely
transformed. As, for example,
The dawn is the wedding of the Night and the Day,
and is neither, and both,
and is, in itself, the most beautiful time,
abundant artless beauty,
free and careless magnificence.
Part Three: Love XIX by Emily Dickinson
Of all the souls that stand create
I have elected one.
When sense from spirit files away,
And subterfuge is done;
When that which is and that which was
Apart, intrinsic, stand,
And this brief tragedy of flesh
Is shifted like a sand;
When figures show their royal front
And mists are carved away,—
Behold the atom I preferred
To all the lists of clay!
Scientific Romance by Tim Pratt
If starship travel from our
Earth to some far
star and back again
at velocities approaching the speed
of light made you younger than me
due to the relativistic effects
of time dilation,
I’d show up on your doorstep hoping
you’d developed a thing for older men,
and I’d ask you to show me everything you
learned to pass the timeout there in the endless void
of night.
If we were the sole survivors
of a zombie apocalypse
and you were bitten and transformed
into a walking corpseI wouldn’t even pick up my
assault shotgun,
I’d just let you take a bite
out of me, because I’d rather be
undead forever
with you
than alive alone
without you.
If I had a time machine, I’d go back
to the days of your youth
to see how you became the someone
I love so much today, and then
I’d return to the moment we first met
just so I could see my own face
when I saw your face
for the first time,
and okay,
I’d probably travel to the time
when we were a young couple
and try to get a three-waygoing. I never understood
why more time travelers don’t do
that sort of thing.
If the alien invaders come
and hover in stern judgment
over our cities, trying to decide
whether to invite us to the Galactic
Federation of Confederated
Galaxies or if instead
a little genocide is called for,
I think our love could be a powerful
argument for the continued preservation
of humanity in general, or at least,
of you and me
in particular.
If we were captives together
in an alien zoo, I’d try to make
the best of it, cultivate a streak
of xeno-exhibitionism,
waggle my eyebrows, and make jokes
about breeding in captivity.
If I became lost in
the multiverse, exploring
infinite parallel dimensions, my
only criterion for settling
down somewhere would be
whether or not I could find you:
and once I did, I’d stay there even
if it was a world ruled by giant spider-
priests, or one where killer
robots won the Civil War, or even
a world where sandwiches
were never invented, because
you’d make it the best
of all possible worlds anyway,
and plus
we could get rich
off inventing sandwiches.
If the Singularity comes
and we upload our minds into a vast
computer simulation of near-infinite
complexity and perfect resolution,
and become capable of experiencing any
fantasy, exploring worlds bound only
by our enhanced imaginations,
I’d still spend at least 10^21 processing
cycles a month just sitting
on a virtual couch with you,
watching virtual TV,
eating virtual fajitas,
holding virtual hands,
and wishing
for the real thing.
The highlighted part is the part I read in the show, but the other verses are quite charming too. Depending on how long you want your reading to be, you could choose the whole thing!
A Strange Galaxy by John Watt
When I gaze into this realm, I see more than the dazzling array
of golden starbursts floating in a cosmic sea of blue-green-gray,
photoreceptors painting post-Impressionistic explosions of colors,
fibers and dilator muscles servicing your ocular aperture.
I see distinctive melanin patterns of a truly original individual -
a retinal scan of exceptional singularity,
each nebula unique, every supernova peculiar,
no quasar like any other.
I passionately absorb with one brief glance
an infinity of nuance,
an eternity of historical archives,
a heaven and earth of emotional journeys.
I am reading your autobiography, the encyclopedia of you.
I remain a student of your sclera,
a pupil of your pupils,
a Vincent of your irises,
going half-mad with the dizzying vastness
of the starry night within your eyes.
Often I Imagine the Earth By Dan Gerber
Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.
Listen back to the show on Mixcloud and look out for next month's show coming soon!
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