Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead,” John Updike (March 18, 1932–January 27, 2009) wrote. “So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” There is a loveliness to this perspective, almost the opposite of nihilism in its untroubled acceptance of existence on its own terms — an acceptance that can’t be unrelated to Updike’s lifelong love of science and his fascination with the laws that govern the universe.
Although best known as a novelist and short story writer, Updike was a lifelong poet and belongs to the small cabal of poets in whose body of work science occupies a significant portion.
In 1985, he published Facing Nature (public library) — an entire collection of his poems celebrating science, among which is a short, charming ode to one of the most bewitching discoveries in physics.
In 1930, fifteen years before Wolfgang Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Einstein’s nomination and nearly two decades before he co-invented synchronicity with Carl Jung, the Austrian-Swiss physicist envisioned a solution to a great enigma: When a neutron transforms into a proton and an electron in a reaction, some of its energy and angular momentum — or spin — seemed to mysteriously disappear. Pauli proposed a new kind of particle, which was soon christened neutrino — a tiny, massless catchall for the missing energy and momentum. It…
The post “Humans of New York” Creator Brandon Stanton Reads John Updike’s Playful and Profound Ode to the Neutrino appeared first on FeedBox.