College: Black Body Poem by Brian Johnston

Brian Johnston
Written during my graduate studies in Physics around 1968.

I love this poem's utilization of images from Physics to illuminate and comment on a real life issue. I think this poem was also motivated by my extreme disappointment in those 'intellectuals' who hide the meaning of their poems in abstract literary references. This seems to me to be a rather extreme form of cultural elitism. These poets are the 'Bullies' on the poetic playground. I hope you, dear reader, will not think me a gang member. See below...

A 'Black Body' is something very different from a 'Black Hole' which is more popular in popular scientific discussions these days. A 'Black Hole' is an immensely huge object usually found at the center of a galaxy. Its gravity is so strong that remote stars millions of light years away are forced to encircle it.

A 'Black Body' however is physical object one can hold in their hands. Stanza's I. & II. in fact describe how you could make your own 'Black Body' out of things found lying around the house.

It's hard to imagine that a stack of razor blades could actually look black but it's true. When the sharp, highly polished edges of the blades are turned toward your eye it actually looks black because all of the light that hits that face is absorbed and cannot reflect back to your eye. So its blackness has nothing to do with color, and everything to do with the absense of light.

It is a little easier to imagine the blackness you see peering into a keyhole of a large chest. No matter how bright the flashlight you use to see what is inside, little light actually comes back out of the keyhole to your eye. It bounces around inside the chest and is again absorbed. It only increases the temperature of the chest.

3rd. Stanza: In Physics the study of 'Black Body' radiation helped to destroy the earlier mechanistic view of the universe which thought that (as crazy as it seems now) that if we knew the position and speed of every atom in the universe we could perfectly predict the future for all time.

The study of 'Black Body' radiation also helped to force Physicists accept a new reality, that it is in fact impossible to know a particle's position if we accurately determine its speed. The opposite is also true. If we accurately know a particles speed, it is impossible to know its position. This research give birth to what is now called 'The Principle of Uncertainty' and so now, instead of seeing the universe as a big mechanical clock that God wound up and then left because he got bored with it, we have a universe where even God perhaps is unsure of what's happening next. Or in the words of my poem, 'And color returned to God's cheeks.' God's creation was no longer a mechanical, predictable monstrosity!

4th Stanza: This last stanza plays off of the word color which is another name of course for 'Non-White People.' The poem then refers back to another property of a 'Black Body' which is that if you heat up a Black Body, it can radiate heat away from itself so efficiently that it will last much longer exposed to intense heat than anything else you might think of. Which brings us to the last line of the poem which suggests, rather humorously I think, that the worse White Society treats People of Color (the more we pack them together like razor blades for example) the more likely they are to evolve beyond us, a kind of social 'survival of the fittest.' Thank you Charles Darwin.