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RE: The Magick of Physics by Felix Flicker is well-written, endearing, engaging, and maddening

in #ccclast year

and, because I rarely shut up and leave the pc to go pull weeds (it's just sooo hot and buggy)....
Here are 12 poignant poems (and one bizarre limerick) written by physicists about physics, and I'm not gonna block quote all these paragraphs.

It can be said that science and poetry share the common purpose of revealing profound truths about the universe and our place in it.

Physicist Paul Dirac, a known curmudgeon, would have dismissed that idea as hogwash.

“The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way,” Dirac grouched to a colleague. “The two are incompatible.”

The colleague to whom Dirac was grumbling, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a lover of poetry who dabbled in it himself — as did, it turns out, quite a few great physicists, past and present. Physicists have often turned to poetry to express ideas for which there are no equations.

(More at the site linked above)