Berkeley: Where Poetry Meets Cyclotrons

Glenn Roberts Jr. of Berkeley Lab shares the story of two poets, Kate Greene and Anastasios Karnazes, who share a love of science and verse. They recently visited the university's 88-inch Cyclotron. "What happens next is an uncommon pairing of accelerated particles and artistic expression," Roberts writes. From there: 

The visiting poets – Kate Greene, a former Berkeley Lab science writer who is an author, essayist, journalist, and poet; and fellow poet, writer, and science enthusiast Anastasios Karnazes – drew inspiration from an overnight stay at the cyclotron from June 14-15 at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Greene and Karnazes met while pursuing master’s degrees in a writing program at Columbia University in New York City. They brought poetry and philosophy works to keep them company during their night at the Lab’s 55-year-old cyclotron. Through the night they wrote, shared readings with one another, and spoke with cyclotron workers.

Poets are like cyclotrons in their ability to both “break and remake,” they noted in a summary statement explaining the purpose of their visit: Cyclotrons can create new elements by fusing atomic nuclei together in high-energy particle beam experiments that bombard one type of element with another, for example, and poets “have been deconstructing and reconfiguring ideas, emotions, experiences, and truths” via a range of devices.

Poets can also play around with time in interesting ways. Greene and Karnazes cited a quote by Bay Area poet Jack Spicer: “A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.” Particle accelerator experiments similarly can dissect and explore time at many different scales.

“Poetry is good for reminding people about time and about different speeds of time,” Karnazes said. “Poetry reminds me to stay present and question the speed at which I am experiencing the world.”

Greene noted that scientists and poets can both convey incredibly dense, layered concepts with choice few letters: Think of Einstein’s “E =mc2” theory that describes the mass and energy equivalence in the universe, or Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be.” She said, “The poem is able to take something as huge as love or death or grief or ambition … and compress them into a few lines.”

She added, “I think a lot of scientists are secret poets. The modes of exploration are quite similar, and the physical embodiment of discovery feels the same, too.”

Read more at Berkeley Lab.