Nobody writes poetry about science

We were quiet, tipped back in padded chairs and waiting for the universe to happen.

The room, round by design and surrounding a metal, insect-like machine that looked like it was about to break free of its moorings and eat Cincinnati, rotated on gimbals the size of car tires to manifest the entirety of the cosmos on the inside of the top half of a sphere that looked much smaller and flatter than it actually was. It didn't create the illusion of depth because it didn't have to - it was literally 3D, sickeningly dark and portraying everything that there ever was that we, as a species, knew about.

We watched galaxies collide with one another in that way that galaxies do, not exploding with the energy of a billion stars but gliding through each other like a pair of combs, like debutantes at a ball, like iron filings swarming to magnets under loose-leaf paper.

Everything we know about the universe was laid out in thirty minutes of narration followed, hopefully, by years of seeing the world a very little bit differently. It was holy, a holy dose of information in a holy place, and it made our circumspect insignificance matter. We bowed down at Zeiss's altar, neck bent, not down to earth but back, reveling in the possibility of everything that isn't us.

Nobody writes poetry about science because the science does it.

Many has been the poet of old,
Whose Nature's secrets, sought to unfold,
To dig down deep, beneath her mask:
To find some truth; this was their task.

By their heart's power, to maybe explain,
The things we all feel; envy, love and pain.
They shone their light on what it all means,
To gain some respite from Nature's schemes.

Science's approach: well, this surely differs,
To explain the surface, that causes its dithers.
Through its advance, we know more and more:
In battle with Nature, this evens the score.

Yet of poetry's comforts, we must still avail:
In this one regard, our science is pale.
Thus understood, it is science's curse,
That with only it, we'd have no more verse!