Imagine you are an alien. You follow beams of diffracted light. A distant celestial object exuding white light. Thousands of Kelvins of blackbody radiation hitting thousands of fine wires. You see those pure spectral colors. You feel their mathematically exact intensities. You squint, and you tune in on – what we call – Red. We…
Tag: Poetry
Dystopic Diffraction – ChatGPT and Poetry
I have been creating Found Poetry from search terms, from spam comments, from my own articles. I’ve followed strict rules and constraints. The stricter, the better. I am removing my consciousness as a human being from the creative process (Not my subconsciousness though!). Turning myself into a paper shuffling office clerk, feeding prompts to an…
Alien Patent Art
Alien is the seed word – feed into Google Patents search. I am searching for alien patents filed between 1900 and 1910. I pick an image from the first patent found, when listing by date ascending. I multiply the image, invert it, color it, and place the series on my favorite black ground. I pick…
The Origin of Darkness
Where does it come from? Why and when did my physics/math/engineering art decide to only dwell on black backgrounds? I am sure there are proper theories in the history of art. I can come up with some armchair psychologist’s explanations – blaming popular culture, clichés, a collage of archetypical memories. I am hacker. We hackers…
Electromagic ~~~ Appeal of Antique Scientific Instruments
A collage of images and a collage of words. The images are public domain technical drawings related to electromagnetism. The lines of the poem are my prompts, followed by phrases from the first Google search results prompted by it. ~~~ Electromagic explore the illuminating history seamless and unforgettable Metal and Wood memory building work…
They Shall Shine in the Dark
On February 24 I wrote: They shall shine in the dark. I use this sentence as a seed for Twitter search poetry – interlacing poetry with temperature waves again . ~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~~ They shall shine in the dark The interstellar void going down much faster determined to take over under renewed attack under…
Loops Near the surface. Lumped Together in Space.
There was a time, when most articles here looked like lab reports or chapters of a thesis. Occasionally, there was a weird poem thrown in. Now is the time for art only, and the thesis-like postings provide for raw material. Temperature waves beneath the ground, driven by the oscillation of the temperature on the surface…
Creative Process. Evolution.
My creative process has been evolving gradually in the past year. ~ I am thinking about a little piece of physics, and how it is described with math. ~ Then I am creating a SageMath notebook (plus custom code) that outputs a set of functions as parametric curves in a three-dimensional space. Here, diffraction patterns…
Celestial Boosted Poetry
A poem from my last physics posts! I have picked unedited snippets from one post, starting at the bottom and moving up, then switching to the other post and again sifting through it from bottom to top. Lines must not be rearranged: the order is dictated by the order in which snippets appeared in the…
Trapped inside the Light Cone
Trapped inside the light cone on a path of eerie fire. Causally connected to your past . . Onward. Celestial spheres embrace the future cone gather round your burning self.
Familiar Wave. Come to Rescue.
A poem from text snippets of my last three posts, interlaced with a metamorphosis of my last drawing. ~ ~~ ~~~ The familiar wave is in the middle, oblique. accessible to intuitive interpretation. To tame it, sort of, come to rescue Or are they? Going from up to down you only care about directions What…
Elliptical Poetry
look at these towers Using the map creating a distorted image projected up to the sphere All connecting rays follow this rule Imaginary number i makes an appearance that borders on the poetic It’s nothing more than a whisper construct the proof for yourself something of a dying art avoid thinking about anything there has…
Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape
Found Poetry found me. I started this website as a science blog, but then I saw poetry in mundane texts – just as you see faces in things. I created poems from spam comments, from search terms, from physics textbooks, from book spines, from error messages, from Facebooks ads, from any text anywhere in the…
Secure Poetry: “I have been quite confident”
A poem from snippets of two postings on cybersecurity. Trying to carve words out of jargon. Details on the creative process at the bottom of the post. I have been quite confident I have been inspired In this simple way to find both options take note of an extra stealth factor I hardly ever…
Farewell Pandemic Poetry
I’ve lost many chances to create poetry from pandemic politics. So many metaphors weren’t used to serve the fine arts. But finally I rise to the challenge. Our grand opening-up-anything is being celebrated in each of our provinces. Text snippets from one of these press conferences this week are intruding my waking and sleeping mind….
Peter M. Schuster on History of Science
The late Dr. Peter M. Schuster was a physicist and historian of science. After a career in industry, he founded a laser technology startup. Recovering from severe illness, he sold his company and became an author, science writer, and historian. He founded echophysics – the European Center for the History of Physics – in Pöllau…
The Calm Before the Wave
A poem, created from text snippets taken out of a National Geographic article on tsunamis. ~ ~~ ~~~ The Calm Before the Wave as the sea pulls away from the coast We thought we would be safe defenses have improved tremendously false sense of security the uncertainty in that forecast seemed high too…
Poets Who Speak of Jupiter
In the third chapter of the first volume of his legendary physics lectures, Richard Feynman discusses the relation of physics to other sciences. He says that astronomy got physics started, and its most remarkable discovery is that stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth. He adds this famous…
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.
Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Integrating the Delta Function (Again) – Dirac Version
The Delta Function is, roughly speaking, shaped like an infinitely tall and infinitely thin needle. It’s discovery – or invention – is commonly attributed to Paul Dirac[*]. Dirac needed a function like this to work with integrals that are common on quantum mechanics, a generalization of a matrix that has 1’s in the diagonal and…
Delta Function Haiku
I have proved that a Lorentzian bell curve becomes the Dirac Delta Function in the limit. Now I want to look at another representation of the Delta Function. As this is a shorter proof, a haiku will do. ~ Infinite numbers of oscillations added. Need to damp them down Symmetrically attach an exponential for each…
The Improper Function and the Poetry of Proofs
Later the Delta Function was named after their founder. Dirac himself called it an improper function. This time, the poem is not from repurposed snippets of his prose. These are just my own words to describe a proof: ~ In the limit the Lorentzian becomes the improper function. In the limit of tiny epsilons it…
Poetry: Dynamical Variables and Observables
The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the second chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition (Revised), Dynamical Variables and Observables. we may look upon the passage for the triple product We therefore make the general rule in spite of this fundamental difference which conforms with…
Poetry: The Principle of Superposition
The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the first chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition (Revised), The Principle of Superposition. ~ one would be inclined to think There must certainly be some internal motion from general philosophical grounds we cannot expect to find any causal…
Edginess: What I Was Searching For
First Spam Poetry since a long time! Every line is an unedited snippet from about 100 spam comments on this blog. Process: View spam comments at random Either pick a phrase from the comment or discard it, then delete the comment. Jump to the next spam comment – spam comments can be processed in any…
Tower in the Middle
To honor Foucault’s Pendulum (the novel), I am creating poetry from it – and in its spirit. Rules: Open the physical book at a random page and point to a random place. Pick a phrase touched by your finger tip. This becomes a line of your poem. Repeat until it feels like the poem has…
When Will It End?
This is internet poetry – “found poetry”. Rules: Google for your chosen title: “When will it end?” Click a random search result, pick one phrase from the text. This is the next line of the poem. Click a random hyperlink on this page, pick a phrase from this text –> next line. It’s not allowed…
The Subtle Power of the Top Snippet. A New Sub-Genre of Google Poetry.
New game, new rules! I have tried to make the rules tougher! Here is some context and history. Search for your site on Google: site:elkement.wordpress.com Pick the first search result in the language of your site[*] Pick a chain of words, a contiguous snippet from this Google search result (use only the snippet on the…
Things You Find in Your Hydraulic Schematic
Building an ice storage powered heat pump system is a DIY adventure – for a Leonardo da Vinci of plumbing, electrical engineering, carpentry, masonry, and computer technology. But that holistic approach is already demonstrated clearly in our hydraulic schematics. Actually, here it is even more daring and bold: There is Plutonium – Pu – everywhere…
Self-Sufficiency Poetry
Our self-sufficiency quota for electrical energy is 30%, but what about the garden? Since I haven’t smart metered every edible wildflower consumed, I resort to Search Term Poetry and random images. This is a summer blog post, lacking the usual number crunching and investigative tech journalism. Search terms are from WordPress statistics and Google Tools….