Tag: Light

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The deepest shade by Mike Fainzilber

the deepest shade of cold
an ambush
for the light

by Mike Fainzilber

The James Webb Space Telescope takes images of the furthest (hence oldest) and faintest objects in the universe using infrared light. In order to do this without being blinded by infrared radiation from heat emitters (including its’ own components) it has detectors that must be hyper-cooled to temperatures of less than 7 degrees Kelvins (which is approximately -266 C or -447 F).

Further reading:

‘James Webb Space Telescope’, nasa.gov, available: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb

Author bio:

Mike Fainzilber’s day job is a biologist. He began writing haiku and senryu during the pandemic, and this side effect of COVID-19 has not worn off yet. Editors in his two spheres of activity have been known to suggest that he should best restrict his efforts to the other sphere. Find out more about Mike’s research via his lab’s website and connect with him on X/Twitter @MFainzilber.

Read more sciku by Mike: ‘Jellyfish’.

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Light by Jonathan Aylett

coming through in waves
or particles, I can’t tell
October sunlight

by Jonathan Aylett

A classically structured haiku using the kigo “October sunlight”, which refers to the well known double slit experiment of quantum physics.

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Author bio:

Jonathan has been writing and publishing poetry for several years. His work has featured in journals dedicated to haiku, and broader literary journals, and won competitions across both disciplines. His collection ‘Goldfish’ – a mix of haiku and long form poetry, will be published by Stairwell books in spring 2024. You can follow Jonathan on Instagram here: @jonathanaylettpoetry 

Read other sciku by Jonathan here: ‘String Theory’, ‘Moss’, ‘Dusty Shoulders’, and ‘Attraction’.

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Dancing by John Hawkhead

photons
E=mc2
dancing

By John Hawkhead

Photons are some of the most fascinating particles in the physical sciences; fundamental particles of light that are the smallest possible packets of electromagnetic energy.

Albert Einstein’s mass–energy equivalence (represented by the formula E = mc2) gives the basic relation between mass and energy, stating that under appropriate situations mass and energy are interchangeable and the same. Yet photons have a rest mass of zero – they are massless particles – therefore should they even have any energy at all? And if they have neither mass nor energy then would they even physically exist?

E = mc2 is actually a special case of the more general equation E2 = p2c2 + m2c4, where E is energy, p is momentum, c is the speed of light and m is mass at rest. Since photons have no mass, this equation becomes E = pc.  Effectively, photons get their energy from their momentum and can never be at rest, constantly moving.

How they move has been the subject of study for decades, with recent research suggesting that photons can behave as both particles and waves (to find out more, check out the sciku ‘Spooky Interaction’, also by John Hawkhead).

This sciku plays around with the concepts of photons, square dancing and the randomness of measuring the path of photons.

Further reading:

‘Light has no mass so it also has no energy according to Einstein, but how can sunlight warm the earth without energy?’, Science Questions with Surprising Answers: https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2014/04/01/light-has-no-mass-so-it-also-has-no-energy-according-to-einstein-but-how-can-sunlight-warm-the-earth-without-energy/

‘Mass–energy equivalence’, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence

‘Does light have mass?’, Physics FAQ: https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SR/light_mass.html

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/). Read more of John’s sciku here!

‘Dancing’ was previously published in Failed Haiku 74 (1 Feb 2022).

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A Sciku for Rayner Explainer by Dr Michael J. Leach

the best science show
at the Fringe—sound & light waves
illuminate minds

by Dr Michael J. Leach

This sciku is a tribute to science communicator Rayner Explainer’s show A Flying Photon.

This show about the all-important photon—an elementary particle of light—has received excellent reviews, including but not limited to ones in InDaily, On The Record UniSA, and The AU Review.

Following sold-out shows at the Adelaide Fringe 2022, A Flying Photon won the Science at the Fringe Award presented by Inspiring SA. You can read more about the show’s topic in Rachel Rayner’s poem ‘Photonics’, which appeared in the debut issue of Consilience.

Check out more sciku by Michael, including ‘The Burden of Bushfire Smoke‘, ‘The Core Correlate of COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance‘, ‘Drug-Induced Hip Fractures‘, ‘The Psychopharmacological Revolution‘, ‘Quality of Life at Seven Years Post-Stroke‘, ‘The Early Impacts of COVID-19 on Australian General Practice‘, and ‘Australian Science Poetry‘ with science communicator Rachel Rayner. Michael also has another Covid-19-related sciku published in Pulse which is well worth checking out: ‘flu shot announcement‘.

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The Dimming Forebear

Gaia. Rooting out
planetary impostures.
K’s false positives.

The Kepler Space Telescope was designed to discover earth-sized planets orbiting around other stars within our region of the Milky Way. Named after German astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler, it was launched in 2009 and retired on the 15th November 2018, the 388th anniversary of the death of its namesake in 1630.

During its lifetime the Kepler Space Telescope discovered 2,662 planets, something it achieved by observing 530,506 stars and looking for drops in their intensity that could indicate a planet passing in front of them. Among these planets were some that were the correct distance from their star and had the right size and atmospheric pressure to support liquid water at the planet’s surface. Other planets discovered orbited two stars instead of one, and ‘hot Jupiters’ – gas giants similar to Jupiter but orbiting in close proximity to their star.

Yet telescopes continue to advance technologically. The Kepler Space Telescope used a photometer to observe the stars in its field of view. The Gaia Space Observatory, launched in 2013, uses a photometer along with an astrometry instrument and a radial-vector spectrometer.

Now research by Niraula et al. (2022) suggests that three or even four of the planets identified by the Kepler Space Telescope aren’t planets at all but are in fact stars. The team was reviewing the planetary data produced by the Kepler Space Telescope and realised that with updated measurements from the Gaia Space Observatory the ‘planets’ Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b were far too large to be planets – each of them two to four times the size of Jupiter. The fourth ‘planet’, Kepler-747b, is 1.8 times the size of Jupiter, at the very top end of observed planets, but its far distance from its star suggests that its more likely to be a star itself than a planet.

Four out of over two and a half thousand discovered planets isn’t a large amount and certainly doesn’t take anything away from the incredible job that the Kepler Space Telescope did during its lifetime. Yet the new findings are hugely important for our knowledge and understanding of planets – by correcting this error the planet dataset is more accurate for those who are studying the population of planets as a whole.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ac4f64

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Dark Matter by John Hawkhead

dark matter theory
how strange particles appear
as they disappear

By John Hawkhead

Dark matter is a term used to describe the effect on the movement of stars by what scientists hypothesise to be matter. However, dark matter does not emit light or energy, and so is ‘invisible’. To hold the elements of the universe together, dark matter must make up approximately 80-85% percent of the universe.

Many scientists think dark matter is made up of particles known as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) or another type of particle the neutrino. The quantum world allows for the existence of virtual particles that can appear and disappear in zero point energy conditions.

Further reading: An Introduction to Dark Matter

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/).

Read more of John’s sciku here!

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Five and almost of a kind by Andrew Senior

I
Never let it be

Never let it be
forgot seeing is feeling
in another form

Sight the light of the blind
Sensation spent in a brain

II
I am most at home

I am most at home
in my imagination
as when science meets

crafted art, sees gravity’s
engines burning in the stars

III
Atoms are the shoes

Atoms are the shoes
of shape. We put them on to
walk this world. Smitten

with them we gallop over
its edge and into the dark

IV
How clever we are

How clever we are
to see what’s coming writing
on bark and spelling

with sticks taken from what had
already deciphered light

V
How dark a pupil

How dark a pupil
looks amplifying light’s streams
exchanging shadings

for meanings when trees convert
them only to be their lives

These five poems, “Shorts” as W.H. Auden used to call them, are part of a long series of meditations in poetry and essay about humility and ignorance, language and its limits and hence also the limits of knowledge. All in the context of science, particularly physics which is my over-riding interest.

Andrew Senior’s lifelong interest in science began as an often bed-ridden sickly child around the age of eight or nine with Astronomy. His professional career was in IT in the world of Unix/Linux servers. But Andrew never gave up an interest in science which by then had expanded from physics into biology courtesy of the best layman source there then was: The Scientific American. Long retired Andrew has continued these interests much assisted by the Internet, puzzling over the ruthless determination of humans to acquire power, gambling with their own extinction in the classic casino manner.