A cosmologist worries (about infinity)

by | Thursday, December 05, 2019

A cosmologist worries (about infinity)
December 2019

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
~ Robert Frost, Desert Places

A cosmologist, surprisingly,
Is worried
about infinity.

It is on his mind,
Clearly, since
He comes back to it 
Often, all evening.

Bollywood music and winter
Are in the air, 
As we hang out,  
Drinks in hand,
Rows of satay on the grill.

Sizzling
In his mind.

It is not the empty spaces
Or vastness, of it all
That bother him.
But rather,
It is the too-muchness
Of the idea.
Where every pattern
and its variant
Can co-exist.

What if, he asks, we live
Not in a finite
world, bounded and complete
But one that goes on
Forever
Just more and more
And unimaginably more
Unending multiples
Of love and self
And regrets and pain
Repeated ad infinitum

Ad Nauseum. 

(I, to appear smart,
mention Borges
and his fear of mirrors
and their power to multiply.)

He comes back to this topic
A steady refrain
Again and
Yes, once again.

There are no themes
He worries
In this plenitude
Just variations
And it is this idea
I figure,
That destroys his mood.

The world is too big
Anyway
I try to say
Flipping the satay
Too much to grasp 
What’s an infinity or more 
To keep us up at night.

As the chicken sizzles
And sudden laughter,
From others by the fire,
Crowds into our talk,
I imagine
Worlds beyond worlds
The same as ours,
Yet
Not the same.

One where, this poem
Ends, maybe 
With some deep insight. 

Note: Inspired by a conversation with Tanmay Vachaspati. New version posted December 10, 2019

Topics related to this post: Aesthetics | Art | Creativity | Fun | Personal | Philosophy | Poetry | Representation | Science | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Learning futures: Designing the horizon

Learning futures: Designing the horizon

I was recently invited (along with Sean Leahy and Jodie Donner) to present at the Winter Games, Digital Immersive Experience organized by ShapingEDU at Arizona State University. Our talk was titled Learning Futures: Designing the Horizon. We described our session as...

Celebrating 10 Years of Re-imagining Creativity, Technology & Learning

Celebrating 10 Years of Re-imagining Creativity, Technology & Learning

10 years ago, we, the Deep-Play Research Group (DPRG), were invited to write a series for the journal TechTrends around the broad and intersecting themes of reimagining creativity, technology, and learning. A decade is a significant chunk of time to devote to a series...

Coding with ChatGPT3: On gaining a superpower

Coding with ChatGPT3: On gaining a superpower

I had heard that ChatGPT3 could help with writing code and just hadn't much time to play with it. Part of the reason is that I haven't really coded in almost 2 decades (maybe more) so was somewhat hesitant to jump in. But again I kept reading of people doing amazing...

The rise of TPACK

Matt Koehler just created a webpage that tracks the citations of our original TCRecord article, as reported by Google Scholar, in real time. The reference is as follows: Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A new...

Only one recipe…

I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood's new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book...

Barriers to Innovation & Inclusion

Leigh Wolf just sent me this video created by the Johnson Space Center on Barriers to Innovation & Inclusion. A Google search led to this description: Last summer, Johnson Space Center senior management coordinated a center-wide, cross-generational effort to explore...

Teachers ARE designers (in many different ways)

Teachers ARE designers (in many different ways)

One of the pleasures of academia is working with awesome graduate students. This paper is an example of such a collaboration. Melissa Warr, for some reason or the other, decided to do a network analysis of some of the top-cited papers related to teaching and design....

What is this thing called text?

Steven Johnson has a great essay on the future of text title: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book. I recommend reading the full thing but here is a quote that sort of captures his vision (though there is more, much more). Here is a great quote: WHEN TEXT IS free to...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *