WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN’D ASTRONOMER
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired, and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman wrote that poem in 1865. Whenever I read it, I think of him sitting inside the stuffy lecture hall, waiting for some crumb of beauty to fall out from between the equations and Greek letters and the charts… but none did. And so he wandered outside to appreciate the beauty of the stars.
I admit I would be the first to tell you that to truly understand the whys and wherefores of astronomy and astrophysics, you have to do a little math. And learn a few Greek letters. And maybe work your way through some stuff that takes some skull sweat. But, there’s a time and a place for all that. Just as there’s a time and a place to leave it all behind as you wander on a darkened hillside late at night, with nothing more overhead than the infinity of space.
No numbers. No letters. No differential equations. No gas laws. No radiative transfer formulae. No Lorenz contractions blithering around in your head. Just the beauty of the stars and planets, all rolled up into some huge conceptual gestalt — some metaphysical awareness of the oneness of the universe and the realization of one’s own place some 1500 light-years from Orion, or 2.5 million light-years from the Andromeda Galaxy, or more than 12 billion years after everything got started in the Big Bang.
That’s Walt Whitman’s job, to take us out there in spirit. The learn’d astronomer inside us can wait a little while the poet that rules our hearts takes over and opens our eyes to the beauty of the cosmos. Besides, a little stargazing brings all the math and science to life in a way you never imagined!
