Richard Poss

University of Arizona

Abstract

Easy Journey to Other Planets?:  Reflections on the Lagrange Points

Among the astronomical phenomena which might inspire humans to creative acts in the arts and humanities, the Lagrange Points have received little attention.  Of relatively recent discovery (they were described by Euler and Lagrange in the 18th century), they can be said to be hardly there at all.  They are points in space, moving around large gravitational masses which have smaller gravitational masses moving in circular orbits about them. 

As astronomical phenomena they share characteristics with other subtle members of the universe (small black holes, dark matter), things which don’t give off light, or reflect light, or explode, or streak through the sky in a blaze of color.  They are moving corners in the sky; they partake of silence, absence, darkness, and empty space.  Not really “points” at all, they may be said to be areas of space slightly different from other areas of space.  And the difference from the surrounding space moves through space.

 

In this way they invite comparison with poetic treatments of emptiness and silence, such as Giacomo Leopardi’s famous poem “L’infinito,” written in 1819 and published in 1826. Leopardi’s meditation on vast emptiness, and the great silence of the infinite, justifiably occupies a prominent place in Italian lyric poetry.  This paper will examine Leopardi’s existential journey through levels of abstraction from a lonely hill near Recanati in Italy to his final shipwreck, or drowning, in the infinite. 

 

The second point of comparison will be John Cage’s subversive deconstruction of the distinction between music (or noise) and silence.  Contrasted with Leopardi’s lonely hill in Recanati is John Cage’s experience in the soundproof isolation chamber at Harvard University in 1951, in which he attempted to immersed himself in pure or complete silence.  Cage’s rejection of any notion of pure silence is compared to the astronomer’s rejection of a pure “vacuum of space.”  His radical redefinition of the very way we think about silence suggests a way of reading the Lagrange points. 

 

This presentation will explain how Lagrange points work in terms of gravitational dynamics, and will examine them in relation to Leopardi’s “L’infinito,” and John Cage’s redefinition of silence.  It will describe the current populations of asteroids in the Lagrange points of the Sun-Jupiter system, amongst the Saturnian moons, in the Sun-Neptune system, and the uses that have been made of the Earth-Moon points.  Future planned uses for the Lagrange points open up a whole new category of potential ways of moving around the solar system without rockets, comparatively “easy journey to other planets.”

Biographical Details

Richard Poss is an Associate Professor in the Astronomy Department, and former director of the Humanities Program, at the University of Arizona.  His research examines astronomical themes in European poetry, and he has published articles on Petrarch, Dante, Veronica Gambara, Walt Whitman, and on the exploration of Mars.  He teaches “history of astronomy” and “astronomy and the arts,” has won a variety of major university teaching awards, and is a frequent instructor in the University of Arizona’s Humanities Seminars.