The Poetics of Astronomy

In the fall and spring I took my core physics in Astronomy. My professors talked about stars beautifully. My friend and I have a shared google doc to document quotes our STEM professors unknowingly know are lyrical, poetic, humorous, and not scientific at all. Here’s the highlights from our Astronomy professors.

Let's look at this, bask in it.

Here was a man who walked with the stars.

Burn bright, die young! A rule in stars. Sounds cool, sounds rebellious.

They’re beautiful! You can show them to your friends!

You have to plot stars by luminosity. (brightness) Isn’t that cute?

These things (dying white dwarfs) are just inner cores that do nothing but “hang out.”

String theory is generous. More like string conjecture, messing around with math that has no bearing on reality, masquerading as truth. But it's ok, I like going to masquerades!

I really wanna fall into a black hole the last few seconds of my existence

It makes sense to revere the sun and the star because–we are their children.

And yet the sun is an ordinary, mediocre star.

Blue stars may only live 10 million years. Is that a lot? Compared to us, yes. We will die sooner, depressing, but true.

Now you must be thinking: ‘Empty space? (black matter) That can’t be a character in our novel’

Start with a plane — because I think in two dimensions, that’s all my feeble brain can do.

(on showing us nebula images) I’ll just be totally honest about what I’m doing here. These are pretty. 

In the 70s comets were, like, the hippest things to be doing if you were an astronomer.

We and the other animals are parasites to the plants.

Let’s forget about Pluto. *sighs* I would so like that to be a planet.

Whenever I look at astronomy things, I just think, oh this is a mess.