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Poem: A Unified Theory of Love

Science in meter and verse

NASA, JPL and Caltech

Edited by Dava Sobel

Should I walk the Planck
length between my heart

and yours, drown in the
liquid abyss of space-time


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deep within my sea dreams
that scope and chart macro

geometries of love by
star arc in night sky,

heaven's whirls of light and
elemental fire would still

shimmer through unfathomed
depth and distance to mark

in micro beats of time
our bodies' magnetic needs.

In bottomless dark we flicker
into being, instant inflation

of nothing into something's
minute entanglements forever

trading quantum places,
to fuse and emanate

our invisible human essence
in and out to infinitude.

Dava Sobel, a former New York Times science reporter, is the author of five books, including the international bestseller Longitude (Walker, 1995). She is the editor of Scientific American's monthly poetry column, Meter.

More by Dava Sobel

Kit Wienert, author of Analogs of Eden (White Dot Press, 2015), has been making and publishing poems for almost 50 years. He lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., having retired from a writing and editing career in medicine, telecommunications and scientific R&D.

More by Kit Wienert
Scientific American Magazine Vol 324 Issue 2This article was originally published with the title “A Unified Theory of Love” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 324 No. 2 (), p. 22
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0221-22