StarDustInMyEyes

THE END OF THE UNIVERSE IN TWO POEMS by Michelle Thaller (Michelle Thaller is an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. A massive-star specialist by trade, she dedicates most of her time to education and public outreach for the Space Infrared Telescope Facility.) Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.. (Robert Frost, 1920) This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper..(T.S. Eliot, 1925) Fire and Ice surely ranks as one of the best-known poems of Robert Frost. What is not widely known about the poem, however, is that Harlow Shapley, one of the founding fathers of modern astronomy, claimed to

"Meddling intellect at the shapes and beauteous forms of things... My mind is a tangled knot I can no longer untie.. Are these the sounds of a distant constellation that have come to us across the vastness of space? There is nothing real outside our perception of reality.."

Embracing alone on the sidewalk, next to automobiles rushing by, next to people watching with curiosity, we're doing the tango and it feels right.. P.Scordos