IN THE LAST OF THE OLD YEAR
By:
August 20, 2024
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
My latest love appeared to me,
Convex and satisfactory.
The carpet grovelled on the floor;
Aunt Edith tried the closet door.
The 9.10 Up passed the 9.10 Down;
Both cried ‘The other way to Town’
The grass looked upward at the flower
Through lenses of a fallen shower.
Here scowled at There; the Now and This
Enjoyed at last connubial bliss.
Out of the tensor Gμν
Hamilton built the world anew.
The photograph upon my shelf
Beat Time — Physician heal thyself.’
[Winter 1926-27]
— In A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, we read: “Though W. H. Auden’s poetry does not foreground linguistic experiment to the extent of Finnegans Wake, he occasionally transforms adverbs of time and place into substantives. In “The Last of the Old Year” (Winter 1926-7, first published in his Juvenilia (1994), “Here scowled at There; the Now and This / Enjoyed at last connubial bliss.” That Auden’s locutions owe something to relativity texts is further suggested by his reference to “the tensor Gμv” in the following line, tensor calculus being central to the non-Euclidean mathematics of Einstein’s general theory.
William Rowan Hamilton’s quaternions foreshadowed the four-dimensional world which Einstein’s general relativity revealed. Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers — which can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional Argand diagram — to higher spatial dimensions. In working with four dimensions, rather than three, he created quaternion algebra. He coined the neologisms “tensor” and “scalar”, and was the first to use the word “vector” in the modern sense.
The Hamilton–Jacobi–Einstein equation is an equation in the Hamiltonian formulation of geometrodynamics in superspace, cast in the “geometrodynamics era” around the 1960s, by Asher Peres in 1962 and others. It is an attempt to reformulate general relativity in such a way that it resembles quantum theory within a semiclassical approximation, much like the correspondence between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.