Poetry of Physics

Sam Illingworth is a Professor of Creative Pedagogies at Edinburgh Napier University, specialising in the intersection of science and the arts. With a PhD in Atmospheric Physics, he is an award-winning science communicator and poet, and founder of Consilience, the world’s first peer-reviewed science poetry journal. Discover more about his work at www.samillingworth.com.

• 1 Introduction2 Living physics3 Environmental physics4 Celestial physics5 Writing physics poems

“Science interleaved with poetry… a wonderful, rich, combination of a summary of the research into a topical issue, the scientific facts established and a poetic response to the issues raised! It’s great!Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, University of Oxford, UK“Sam Illingworth has fused the poet part of his nature with the physicist he studied to become and produced a novel formula for interpreting scientific research. The Poetry of Physics – part data, part emotional response, part vision in verse – is the happy outcome.”Dava Sobel, poetry editor at Scientific American, author of Galileo's Daughter“The Poetry of Physics opens a welcome, helpful door between two realms often considered utterly separate. Well-chosen science anecdotes become expressive poems that demonstrate how the often-alien language of scientific papers can be translated into very human contexts.”Alice Major, poet, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene