The struggle of women in science is written in the stars
In her 1968 poem, Planetarium, the poet Adrienne Rich wrestles with the crisis of female identity through the lens of astronomy. Rich wrote the poem after learning about the case of Caroline Herschel, an astronomer born in Germany in 1750 who discovered eight comets and three nebulae, and drew praise from the King of Prussia and London’s Royal Astronomical Society. Yet Caroline remained obscure compared with her brother, William, who discovered the planet Uranus.
Posted on: 19 August 2016
Gregory Tate interviews Poet and Physicist Iggy McGovern
In 2014 Gregory Tate recorded a documentary for Radio 3 about scientists who write poetry. One of the scientists whose work featured in the documentary was Iggy McGovern, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin whose most recent volume of poetry is A Mystic Dream of 4, a sonnet sequence based on the life of the nineteenth-century mathematician, astronomer, and poet William Rowan Hamilton.
Posted on: 5 July 2016