Kaća Bradonjić
“Best Witchcraft is Geometry
To the magician’s mind —
His ordinary acts are feats
To thinking of mankind.”
Dickinson, Emily. “Best Witchcraft is Geometry.” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Little, Brown and Company, 1960, p. 517.
Poetic physics of Seamus Heaney. An excerpt form “The Smoothing Iron.”
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing ironlike a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain massthrough a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Heaney, Seamus. “The Smoothing Iron.” Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Print.
A romantic take on relativity of simultaneity by my student in PHYS 101, Einstein’s Century, a modern physics course for non-science majors.
You and I and our perspective frames
are resting relative to one another.
So, how is it that we disagree?
I say, “We fell in love the day we met.”
You say, “It was much later.” But I know
what I observed; the forehead kisses, and
flushed cheeks, all of the more primitive signs,
pointed to us in love at the same time.
Maybe we were never quite in sync.
At times when you appeared to pull away
I, too, was moving, relative to you,
and moving fast. So though we are at rest
today, in our not-quite-so-distant past
simultaneity was an illusion.Celina Reynes, Wellesley College ’16
A 1960’s instructional video on inertial frames — a visual gem and an instructional piece of art.
A personal story I shared for the The Story Collider show at the OBERON theater in Cambridge on December 16, 2015. I owe much gratitude to the show’s producers Ari Daniel and Christine Gentry for all their help.
After discussing relativity with Einstein, Carl Jung thought he could explain the results of Joseph Rhine‘s extrasensory perception experiments (EPS) with psychic relativity of space and time:
In my essay ‘On the Nature of the Psyche,’ I considered synchronicity as a psychically conditioned relativity of space and time. Rhine’s experiments show that in relation to the psyche space and time are, so to speak, ‘elastic’ and can apparently be reduced almost to vanishing point, as though they were dependent on psychic conditions and did not exist in themselves but were only ‘postulated’ by the conscious mind.
Jung, Carl G. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 8, Bollingen Series XX). 1960. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Print
A love story of Chronos, the personified time, and a mortal woman, as conceived by Salvador Dalí and John Hench of the Disney company in 1946 and brought to completion by Disney in 2003. It is set to a lovely song composed by Armando Dominguez and performed by Dora Luz.
Lorca, F. G. The Selected Poems of F. G. Lorca. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2005.