Here a just a few examples of the many poetry connections throughout the book.

Chapter 1

Symmetry is a recurring theme in the book.  Here are a few examples of poetry connections to symmetry

Ann  Wickham expresses symmetry's overwhelming appeal:

God, thou great symmetry

Who put a biting lust in me

From whence my arrows spring,

For all the frittered days

That I have spent in shapeless ways

Give me one perfect thing,

And From Chapter 4

If perfect and rigid symmetry would prevail always and everywhere, nature would hardly be as interesting, a sentiment which Anna Wickham captures eloquently in her reproach

"For love he offered me his perfect world

This world was so constructed and so small

It had no loveliness at all

And I flung back the little silly ball

At that cold moralist I hotly hurled

His perfect, pure, symmetric, small world."

From Chapter 2

Dismantling the atom, Thomson initiated the relentless descent into the heart of matter.   Of the monumental discovery, Thomson's student, A. A. Robb celebrates with::

All preconceived notions he sets at defiance

By means of some neat and ingenious appliance

By which he discovers a new law of science

Which no one had ever suspected before.

All the chemists went off into fits,

Some of them thought they were losing their wits,

When quite without warning

(Their theories scorning)

The atom one morning

He broke into bits.

.After Roentgen's discovery, humorists warned against the intrusive power of the new x-rays:

X-ACTLY SO!

TheRoentgenRays, theRoentgen rays

What is this craze?

The town s ablaze

With the newphase

of X-ray s ways.

I m full of daze

Shock and amaze;

For nowadays

I hear they ll gaze

Thro cloak and gown and even stays,

These naughty,naughty Roentgen Rays.

John Updike makes light of the neutrino  in Cosmic Gall:

Neutrinos, they are very small.

They have no charge and have no mass

And do not interact at all.

The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

They snub the most exquisite gas,

Ignore the most substantial wall,

Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,

Insult the stallion in his stall,

And, scorning barriers of class,

Infiltrate you and me! Like tall

And painless guillotines, they fall

Down through our heads into the grass.

At night they enter at Nepal

And pierce the lover and his lass

From underneath the bed; you call

It wonderful; I call it crass.

From Chapter 3

Communications became the first beneficiary of electromagnetic science and technology. With an undersea Atlantic cable connecting Europe and America, Morse- code clicks generating dots and dashes in Ireland moved needles and mirrors in Newfoundland. Queen Victoria exchanged instant telegraph greetings with President Buchanan in 1866.  Fascinated by the possibilities, amateur poet Maxwell wrote this ode to pioneers of electrical and magnetic science who paved the way to the historic moment :

Valentine by a telegraph clerk to a telegraph clerk

The tendrils of my soul are twined

With thine, though many a mile apart,

And thine in closed coiled circuits wind

Around the needle of my heart...

O tell me when along the line

From my full heart the message flows,

What currents are induced in thine?

One click from thee

Through many an Ohm and Weber flows

And clicked this answer back to me

I am thy Farad staunch and true

Charged to a Volt with love for thee.

From Chapter 5

The moon s changing appearance  fascinated all cultures. Some were comforted by the faithful regularity of its gentle waxing and waning. Others were troubled by its fickle appearance. In Shakespeare's most popular romance, Romeo's pledge distresses Juliet:

Romeo:

Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear

That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops

Juliet:

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,

That monthly changes in her circled orb,

Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

The steady North Star stirred the imagination of poets over all time. Always full of astronomical references, Shakespeare compares Julius Caesar's steadfastness to Polaris

I am constant as the northern star,

Of whose true fixed and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament.

The skies are painted with unnumb'rd sparks,

They are all fire and everyone doth shine;

But there's but one in all dothhold his place...

As constellations progress across the sky through the course of a single night, they change orientation, but not their defining patterns, or their relative spacings.   Nineteenth century poet and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, lauds their permanence:

"Teach me your mood, O patient stars!

Who climb each night the ancient sky,

Leaving no space, no shade, no scars,

No trace of age, no fear to die."

Both Egyptians and Greeks exalted Sirius' splendor, but more often they dreaded it by association with the blistering hot days of summer.  In the words of King Priam from the walls of Troy, Homer compared the dreaded advance of Achilles to Sirius:

"...blazing as the star that cometh forth at Harvest-time,

shining forth amid the host of stars in the darkness of the night,

the star whose name men call Orion's Dog.

Brightest of all is he, yet for an evil sign is he set,

and bringeth much fever upon hapless men..."

 The mystery of eclipses charged humanity with fear.  Greek poet Archilochus (ca. 648 BC) wondered about other seeming impossibilities.  Could sheep live in the oceans?  Could dolphins move to dry land:

"Nothing is strange, nothing impossible,

Nor marvelous, since Zeus the father of gods

Brought night to midday when he hid the light

Of the shining sun.  Grim fear has smitten us,

And anything can happen to mankind.

Let no man marvel if he sees the flocks

Yield up their grassy pasture to the dolphins

And seek the salty billows of the deep,

Grown dearer to them than their native meadows,

While to the fishes sweeter seem the mountains."

Members of many cultures thought of a comet as a heavenly dagger hanging over the world, threatening disaster.  In Paradise Lost, the 17th century poet Milton invoked a similar image as he recreated the wrath of God sweeping out the sinners from Paradise with his mighty sword:

High in front advanced,

The brandished sword of God before them blazed

Fierce as a comet..."

Our name for Jupiter is the Roman one for Zeus Pater, or Father Zeus.  In Paradiso, the 14th century poet, Dante, captures the qualities of Jupiter when his hero encounters this most sensible planet in his imaginary journey through the heavens:

"Turning, I perceived

The whiteness round me of the temperate star...

And in that torch of Jove, I was aware

Of sparkles from the love within it warm...

O sweet star, with how many and rare a gem

Didst thou prove that the justice we obey

Proceedeth from the heaven thou dost begem!"

A Babylonian tablet gives an enchanting description about Venus (who they called Ishtar).

Ishtar is clothed with pleasure and love

She is laden with vitality, charm and voluptuousness.

In lips she is sweet; life is in her mouth.

At her appearance rejoicing becomes full.

She is glorious; veils are thrown over her head.

Her figure is beautiful; her eyes are brilliant.

In his poetic trilogy about the achievements of scientific pioneers, Alfred Noyes contemplated the discovery of Uranus:

"Then, as I turned on Gemini,

And the deep stillness of those constant lights,

Castor and Pollux, lucid pilot-stars,

Began to calm the fever of my blood,

I saw, O first of all mankind, I saw

The disc of my new planet gliding there

Beyond our tumults, in that realm of peace."

From Chapter 6

Pythagoras love for harmony persists through our language when we describe a beautiful symphony as "music of the spheres."  His predilection for spherical symmetry and circular paths pervaded astronomical thinking for millennia to come.  Even Copernicus, who overthrew the earth-centric scheme with a heliocentric model, continued to think of planetary motion in terms of perfect circles around a new central point, the sun.  In Arcades, the blind poet Milton echoes the scientist's deep longing to "hear" celestial harmonies:

"But else in deep of night when drowsiness

Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I

To the celestial Sirens harmony...

Such sweet compulsion doth in music ly,

To lull the daughters of necessity,

And keep unsteady Nature to her law,

And the low world in measur'd motion draw

After the heavenly tune, which none can hear

Of human mould with grosse unpurged ear."

Chapter 7

For 1500 years, astronomers used Ptolemaic constructs of phantom circles to predict planetary positions. In Paradise Lost, the 17th century poet John Milton captures the monumental effort to save the spherical rule of the cosmos:

"Whey they come to model Heaven

And calculate the stars, how they will wield

The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive

To save appearances, how gird the sphere

With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb."

Our Milky Way galactic realm is populated by a hundred billion stars. We wonder with poet Elizabeth Carter about the possibilities lurking in such incredible numbers:

"Throughout the Galaxy's extended line

Unnumbered orbs in gay confusion shine,

Where ev'ry star that gilds the gloom of night

With the faint trembling of a distant light

Perhaps illumes some system of its own

With the strong influence of a radiant sun."

Yet like Walt Whitman In Song of Myself, we also wonder how we continue to hold a special place and role with our calm rational ability to understand the cosmos.

"And there is no object so soft but it makes for the wheel'd universe

And I say to every man or woman, Let your soul stand cool

and composed before a million universes."

Extrapolating Copernicus' ideas, Bruno raised provocative questions.  If earth rotates, there is no longer any reason to postulate a stellar sphere.  If the distance to stars is immeasurably large, maybe the stars spread out over an infinite universe.  With poetic words, Bruno's vivid imagination burst the starry celestial sphere:

"Henceforth I spread confident wings to space;

I fear no barrier of crystal glass;

I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite.

And while I rise from my own globe to others

And penetrate ever further through the eternal field,

That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me."

Chapter 8

Shakespeare makes liberal use of cometary warnings, sometimes with skepticism.  In Henry VI, Charles responds to news of a signal light:

Bastard of Orleans:

See, noble Charles, the beacon of our friend;

The burning torch in yonder turret stands.

Charles:

Now shine it like a comet of revenge,

A prophet to the fall of all our foes!

 "When beggars die, there are no comets seen

 The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

.In The Princess, poet Tennyson  shrewdly hints at prevailing, Kant-Laplacian ideas about the origin of stars and planetary systems from interstellar clouds of gas and dust

"This world was once a fluid haze of light,

Till toward the center set the starry tides,

And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast

The planets."

English physician and poet Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the author of the theory of evolution, wonders prophetically about the ultimate fate that could befall such lilies of the heavenly fields:

"Roll on, ye stars! exult in youthful prime,

Mark with bright curves the printless steps of time...

Flowers of the sky! ye too must yield,

Frail as your silken sisters of the field."

Chapter 9

In Hamlet, Shakespeare stresses the importance of being open to new discoveries and ideas

Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

.Intoxicated by Galileo's telescopic  revelations, John Donne wrote:

"Man has weav'd out a net, and this net thrown

Upon the Heavens, and now they are his own."

Integrating ancient river myths with the telescopic find, Longfellow paints the Milky Way as

"...torrent of light and river of the air,

Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen

Like gold and silver in some ravine."

. In The Torch Bearers, a poetic trilogy about pioneers of science, the poet Aflred Noyes writes

"I see beyond this island universe,

Beyond our sun, and all those other suns

That throng the Milky Way, far, far beyond,

A thousand little wisps, faint nebulae,

...Faint as the mist by one dewdrop breathed

At dawn, and yet a universe like our own;

Each wisp a universe, a vast galaxy

Wide as our night of stars."

Chapter 11

Romantic poet, and fiery champion of oppressed people, Lord Byron poignantly captured the fundamental significance of Newton s revelation:

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found

In that slight startle from his contemplation

A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round

In a most natural whirl, called gravitation ;

And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,

Since Adam,with a fall,or with an Apple.

 Francis Thompson )captured the universal nature of gravity with this verse

All things by immortal power

Near or far

Hiddenly

To each other linked are

That thou canst not stir a .ower

Without the troubling of a star.

From Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

All are but parts of one stupendous whole

Whose body Nature is, and God the soul...

All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And,spite of pride, in erring reason s spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is,is right.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.