Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!
- Phillipe Diolé
I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.
When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils of the Mariana trench. At some point in my career, I ported my energies outward to the cosmos, reasoning, as the ancient alchemists did, that "As Above, So Below."
The movement from the deep to the distant, from sea to space, seemed like a sensible evolution. I saw…
Void
Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe.
What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this,
and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this:
Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…