Lesson Plan for Sue Owen’s “This Is the Cosmos”
by Laurie A. Williams

Read this poem aloud in class.

Ask students who the cosmos is speaking to. Re-read lines 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, “This is the cosmos/ speaking to you now because/ I know you’ve been busy/ eavesdropping on my thoughts/ and staring hard at me, . . .” and also lines 12, 13, and 14 “that will always shine dimly,/ on my black holes that/ my stars prefer to your gravity, . . .”

Who is the you? What are the possibilities? Are human beings the only possibilities? This poem suspends disbelief in allowing the cosmos to talk. What has gravity? And what is the metaphoric meaning of gravity?

What comments is this poem making on astronomy? on science in general?

Do you agree with what the “Cosmos” says in this poem?

Read this excerpt from Jonah Lehrer’s article “The Future of Science . . . is Art? (Seed, January 16, 2008). Science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense. As Richard Feynman put it, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” It’s a brute fact of psychology that the human mind cannot comprehend the double-digit dimensions of string theory, or the possibility of parallel universes. Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. This is the irony of modern physics: It seeks reality in its most fundamental form, and yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending these fundaments beyond the math we use to represent them. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.

As a result, the history of physics is littered with metaphorical leaps. Einstein grasped relativity while thinking about moving trains. Arthur Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon. James Clerk Maxwell thought of magnetic fields as little whirlpools in space, which he called vortices. The Big Bang was just a cosmic firecracker. Schrödinger’s cat, trapped in a cosmic purgatory, helped illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It’s hard to imagine string theory without its garden hose.

These scientific similes might seem like quaint oversimplifications, but they actually perform a much more profound function. As the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman writes, “Metaphor in science serves not just as a pedagogical device, but also as an aid to scientific discovery. In doing science, even though words and equations are used with the intention of having precise meaning, it is almost impossible not to reason by physical analogy, not to form mental pictures, not to imagine balls bouncing and pendulums swinging.” The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms, so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations. The world of our ideas is framed by the only world we know. . . .

This is why modern physics needs the arts. Once we accept the importance of metaphor to the scientific process, we can start thinking about how we can make those metaphors better. Poets, of course, are masters of metaphor: The power of their art depends on the compression of meaning into meter; vague feelings are translated into visceral images. It’s not a coincidence that many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century—eminent figures like Einstein, Feynman, and Bohr—were known for their distinctly romantic method of thinking. These eminent scientists depended on their ability to use metaphor to see what no one else had ever seen, so that the railroad became a metaphor for relativity, and a drop of liquid helped symbolize the atomic nucleus. Poets can speed this scientific process along, helping physicists to invent new metaphors and improve their old ones. Perhaps we can do better than a garden hose. Maybe a simile will help unlock the secret of dark matter. As the string theorist Brian Greene recently wrote, the arts have the ability to “give a vigorous shake to our sense of what’s real,” jarring the scientific imagination into imagining new things.

Do you agree with Mr. Lehrer’s ideas?

Choose a topic you have studied in your science class and create a metaphor and/or simile for that topic.

For a writing assignment, choose an object. It can be an item from a lab experiment, or something larger like dark matter, and write a poem that allows that object to “speak.” Use Ms. Owen’s poem as a model.

Lesson Plan for Sue Owen’s “This Is the Cosmos”
by Laurie A. Williams

Pass this poem out to students. Before they read it, have students number the lines on the left hand side. Have students note the number of lines in the poem and the structure of each stanza. If they do not know the term quatrain (4 line stanza) introduce that term. Just by looking at the structure of the poem, what are the reader’s expectations? (Looking for well-ordered here).

Have students look at the title, “This Is the Cosmos.” Just looking at the title, what are the reader’s expectations?

Read the poem aloud in class and have students look for science related terms and images, and poetic devices, language, and images. If students do not know the terms personification and dramatic monologue, introduce them, or reintroduce them.

Have students identify the speaker and the listener.

Re-read lines 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, “This is the cosmos/ speaking to you now because/ I know you’ve been busy/ eavesdropping on my thoughts/ and staring hard at me, . . .” and also lines 12, 13, and 14 “that will always shine dimly,/ on my black holes that/ my stars prefer to your gravity, . . .”

Who is the you? What are the possibilities? Are human beings the only possibilities? This poem suspends disbelief in allowing the cosmos to talk.

Read this excerpt from Jonah Lehrer’s article “The Future of Science . . . is Art? (Seed, January 16, 2008). Science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense. As Richard Feynman put it, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” It’s a brute fact of psychology that the human mind cannot comprehend the double-digit dimensions of string theory, or the possibility of parallel universes. Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. This is the irony of modern physics: It seeks reality in its most fundamental form, and yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending these fundaments beyond the math we use to represent them. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.

As a result, the history of physics is littered with metaphorical leaps. Einstein grasped relativity while thinking about moving trains. Arthur Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon. James Clerk Maxwell thought of magnetic fields as little whirlpools in space, which he called vortices. The Big Bang was just a cosmic firecracker. Schrödinger’s cat, trapped in a cosmic purgatory, helped illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It’s hard to imagine string theory without its garden hose.

These scientific similes might seem like quaint oversimplifications, but they actually perform a much more profound function. As the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman writes, “Metaphor in science serves not just as a pedagogical device, but also as an aid to scientific discovery. In doing science, even though words and equations are used with the intention of having precise meaning, it is almost impossible not to reason by physical analogy, not to form mental pictures, not to imagine balls bouncing and pendulums swinging.” The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms, so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations. The world of our ideas is framed by the only world we know. . . .

This is why modern physics needs the arts. Once we accept the importance of metaphor to the scientific process, we can start thinking about how we can make those metaphors better. Poets, of course, are masters of metaphor: The power of their art depends on the compression of meaning into meter; vague feelings are translated into visceral images. It’s not a coincidence that many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century—eminent figures like Einstein, Feynman, and Bohr—were known for their distinctly romantic method of thinking. These eminent scientists depended on their ability to use metaphor to see what no one else had ever seen, so that the railroad became a metaphor for relativity, and a drop of liquid helped symbolize the atomic nucleus. Poets can speed this scientific process along, helping physicists to invent new metaphors and improve their old ones. Perhaps we can do better than a garden hose. Maybe a simile will help unlock the secret of dark matter. As the string theorist Brian Greene recently wrote, the arts have the ability to “give a vigorous shake to our sense of what’s real,” jarring the scientific imagination into imagining new things.

Do you agree with Mr. Lehrer’s ideas?

Choose a science topic you have studied in your science class and create a metaphor and/or simile for that topic.

For a writing assignment, choose an object that pertains to science, and write a poem that allows that object to “speak.” Use Ms. Owen’s poem as a model.