A serpent’s tail spring poem.

Grey and full of rain,

pain fills the eyes of the sky,

flying with ragged clouds.

Shrouds of mist,

kissed by damp earth,

worth more than gold,

cold but full of life.

Knife-edge to the wind that stings,

rings the bare-budded trees with rime—

time for spring to show, we say,

grey and full of rain.

–

Recorded at the Google Talks series in Los Angeles, Dr. Janna Levin talks about why the recent recording of a black hole collision is so extraordinary.

—

Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a center for arts and sciences in Brooklyn, and has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. Her previous books include How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. She was recently named a Guggenheim fellow.

Email subscribers may click on the title of this post to watch the video.

.