Dark was the night, cold was the ground / NASA’s Voyager 2 probe, currently on a journey toward interstellar space, has detected an increase in cosmic rays that originate outside our solar system. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in September 2013. (Elena Soto)
Schrödinger’s Kitten / «But Erwin has chosen her as quantum kitty.
and entertains herself by scratching equations…» (Elena Soto)
Poem to Maxwell’s demon
«Dressed in a kilt,
crouched among heather and thistles,
a being smiles maliciously,
seeking to violate the second principle of thermodynamics,
What if there was a creature
small enough to see every molecule and follow it?»
Sometimes algebra fascinates to DNA / To Alan Mathison Turing /
«the deep jet black of angelfish
flows in equations,
settles in the genes…» (Elena Soto)
In the Dirac’s ocean / To Paul Dirac /
«leatherback sea turtles navigate
in the foam of spacetime Dirac’s ocean
with an imaginary companion…» (Elena Soto)
The water cycle / This rain that wets my hair now has been saliva in the pharaoh tongue.
kernlose winter / «During the winter in the central part of the Antarctic continent temperatures are trapped by an average of -62 ° C, experiencing minimal variations. ‘Kernlose winter’ – literally winter without soul, without core, without heart – designates this peculiar thermal phenomenon». (Elena Soto)
Portrait of paleontologist with dog / To Mary Anning /
«Every day, Mary walks to the paradise of the flying dragons and the lizard fishes,
she travels millions of years ago,
until a deep time inhabited by strange creatures». (Elena Soto)
Urania raised her head in the Small Magellanic Cloud / To Henrietta Leavitt /
«Down here, in the basement of the Harvard Observatory,
a white firmament extends into glass plates,
millions of stars in the southern hemisphere motionless
nailed to images like tiny butterflies». (Elena Soto)
Unknown pleasures in the constellation of the Vixen / To Jocelyn Bell /
«Later, she discovered that the origin of the regular beep-beep
it was a star corpse rotating like a ghost beacon.
There were no galactic goblins». (Elena Soto)
A hunch in the white forest / Poem to Lise Meitner /
«The glow fit the equations.
Lise saw the uranium nucleus split as a liquid drop,
like a hesitant tear,
that finally slips before the crying comes,
in a liberating chain reaction mechanism.
It was a hunch in the white forest». (Elena Soto)
Cassiopeia A cross stitch / Poem to Cecilia Payne
«Cecilia, stitch by stitch,
embroiders the death of a supernova,
which scatters its remains on the edge of the abyss.
Some 11,000 light years away,
Cassiopeia A spreads its wings like a butterfly,
and the scales end up darned into the fabric»; (Elena Soto)
Mermaid tears / Each kilometer of ocean contains an average of 74,000 plastic fragments. The so-called ‘mermaid tears’ are tiny balls of this material – not even five millimeters in diameter – that are spread throughout the world’s waters and have become a global threat.
«In the limbo of oceanic gyres,
our floating kingdom, beautiful as the rainbow trout,
spills in mermaid tears». (Elena Soto)
Ettore left in Naples half of his absence / To Ettore Majorana /
«On March 27, 1938
Ettore Majorana disappeared in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
He threw himself into the sea from a boat
-that was at least the official version-,
but, perhaps, extra dimensions hidden under the water
transformed his body
into a metaphor for the particle he loved». (Elena Soto)
The mathematical eye of Horus / Elena Soto
«With a quarter of the iris,
an eighth of the eyebrow,
a sixty-fourth of the tear…
And, although each fraction
is always half of the previous one,
the sum never reaches unity…»
establo Pegaso 