Eat The Stars Sweet Cello String

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This poem by the late, great Rebecca Elson — a rare scientist-poet who returned her stardust to the universe when she was only a touch older than I am now — has given me tremendous succor and radiance for years. Link in bio to hear @JannaLevin — another rare scientific mind with a poetic soul — read it with a gorgeous prefatory reflection on the relationship between science and poetry, between the objective and the subjective, as we face the universe without and the universe within. With original music by @zoecello from her soundtrack for the forthcoming documentary about the Event Horizon Telescope, which recently captured humanity’s historic first glimpse of a black hole. (Janna works on black holes; Elson was among the select scientists tasked with studying the first images returned by the Hubble Space Telescope, that pioneering emblem of our most ambitious tool-making and our longing for intimate contact with the nature of reality.)

A post shared by Maria Popova (@brainpicker) on Apr 12, 2020 at 1:45pm PDT