SPACE editorial

By | 4 February 2025

Alicia Sometimes

We often think of outer space as being vast, daunting and mostly empty, but it is abundant with fields we just can’t see. There are different kinds of fields, some are classical or quantum – all with values assigned to them. Coordinates. In all space. For example, on a weather map, the surface temperature is described by assigning a number to each point on the map. The Higgs Field itself has a value. Spacetime acts as a sort of grid¬ — bending, warping, rippling, changing as anything interacts with it.

Every day we go about our lives unaware vital components of the universe ‘interact’ with us without (always) being noticed: neutrinos, gravitational waves, cosmic rays, infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, microwaves and more. We cannot see dark energy, a mysterious force that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe. And we cannot see dark matter which is thought to be what stops galaxies from flying apart (although it has been detected indirectly).

‘Space’ is how we interact with our environment. At any given moment.

Dr Grace Lawrence, a dark matter ‘hunter’ explains, ‘In this room right at this moment there’s any number of things passing through us. We have photons from the lights bouncing around. Our own voices are carrying around. Even though we’re inside and we’re not seeing sunshine, things like cosmic ray muons from the sun are passing through us right at this very moment. And at every second of every day, billions of dark matter particles are flowing through this room…’

Dr Katie Mack, a theoretical astrophysicist who currently holds the position of Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics explains how ‘invisible’ influences affect her space:

‘Every once in a while, when I’m lying in bed I’ll think about gravitational waves. The way gravitational waves work is they stretch you, and they squeeze you, and they stretch you, and they squeeze you, and a tiny fraction of the size of a proton is the magnitude of that, right? So, it’s not perceivable, but it’s happening. And so, every once in a while, I just get this feeling of almost a dizziness of what the universe is doing to my body right now.’

Her poem in this issue, ‘Disorientation’ is a remarkable lyrical glimpse into the awe of space:

‘I want to reach into your consciousness and cast it outward, beyond the light of other suns, to expand it like the universe, not encroaching on some envelope of emptiness, but growing larger, unfolding inside itself…’

Theoretical physicist Domino Valdano wrote, ‘The distinction between language and reality in modern physics has become very blurry and interconnected — often it’s impossible to say where one begins and the other ends.’ Language plays an active role in the development of scientific ideas and is essential in communicating facts, suppositions and theories.

This excites me no end but also, poetics can bend, warp, ripple and change as anything interacts with it. So, as poets, we can completely play with and shape our written space, creating endless universes. Poetry has so much to learn from science.

Space is outer, inner and all encompassing.

Thank you to everyone who submitted. There were so many incredible poems. Thanks especially to Professor Tamara Davis, Dr Katie Mack, Professor Sam Illingworth and Associate Professor Alice Gorman for sharing their stunning science-poet minds. Each one of them has had a lasting influence on my curiosity and love for science and cosmic words.

I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I have.

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