The last words in my extremely full notebook are: no matter how many questions come up, within those answers, more questions come up.

So many questions! Professor Tamara Davis and the team at the School of Mathematics and Physics could not be more fascinating, supportive and other endless superlatives that mean ‘incredibly engaging and kind’ and I still have a whole world of questions.

I was lucky enough to spend ten days on campus with many of the team studying the foundations of the history of the universe, what we see today and where we could be heading. Their hard work and dedication means there is a great deal of richness, curiosity and variety in what they are examining. My head was dizzy each day with so much new information (for me) which is why I coped the way I always cope. By writing galaxies of notes. And recording voices.

 
The scientists are asking the biggest questions. They are looking at light curves, our accelerating cosmos, peculiar velocities of galaxies, hierarchy of stars, emerging phenomena, various distributions, spheres, oscillations, extrasolar planets, mountains of data and so much more. What is dark energy? What is dark matter? What are all the puzzles in between? Many have said this before about scientists: they are so often detectives, rifling through numbers, images, equations and findings to work out patterns, points of illumination and finally, answers.

I’m delving into the many captivating concepts, ideas and studies the team are immersing themselves in, but I am also investigating words and phrases. In and out of context, there’s so much poetry in them:

a ripple in the metric (like snapping a blanket)
splashback radius
supercluster dispersions
local structure
(of a particular equation) it was puffy
muscles of the binary system

and words that have different/bendable/interesting meanings in this field to what we might be used to:

exotic
stochastic
tightness
smoothness
flow-path
tension
scalar
resonance
eccentricities

This is just the very tip of the word-web. I’m patching together a lot of the research and keep getting side tracked by writing poems (the cheek!). I can’t stop being inspired to create.

I look forward to spending more time in person with the team later this month and in November.

I was also fortunate enough to conduct a poetry workshop where everyone in the room was not only a physicist but, I argue, a poet as well. Many of the attendees wrote about their work with passionate clarity and creativity.

Andrea Rassell (alumni of ANAT’s Synapse residency and all round superstar) also joined me to talk about her work, data sonification and science-art. I’m hoping we can join forces to work on a collaboration as well.

I’ll leave you with Tamara’s poem she wrote in the workshop. Is there anything she can’t do?

An Empty Spec in the Infinite Future
Tamara Davis

The empty spec is made of loneliness
It screams into the void, silent
Eternity is quiet, still, poised for nothing
The memory of touch is vaporous
It feels heartbreak.
For what it forgets, what it knew
The youthful energy squandered
The bitter taste of solitude
As it races to infinity
Thinking
I am the final life in a dead cosmos.