Prof.

Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

The God Paper

“Había gigantes en la tierra en aquellos días y también después que se llegaron los hijos de Dios a las hijas de los hombres y les
engendraron hijos. Estos fueron los valientes que desde la antigüedad fueron varones de renombre”.
Génesis 6, 4

At a forgotten cliff the

Ballerina draws imaginary birds with her
Hands. I am the bird and you
The imaginary

I have been trying to write poetry since age 10 (1963), first in response to love letters from a girl who used
to ride the school bus with my elder sister. From her modest collection of books, which included many basics from
“The Shoes of the Fisherman” to “Travel to the Moon”, my mom lent me a book by Gustavo Adolfo Bequer,
“Rimas”, which I carefully copied, then adapted, and finally modified to please the unknown soul of a mysterious
girl. She kept the collection like an apothecary in a bookcase behind which I met my extra-terrestrial friends, who
revealed to me my true origins: I had been planted on earth by them as an experiment. The year before I had taken
my First Communion (it was the Catholic School of La Salle Christian Brothers) so as a Christmas gift I asked for a
book with The Life of Jesus, which my mom again promptly facilitated. That year I had been watching the TV shows
“Star Trek”, “The Outer Limits”, and “The Twilight Zone” (all in Spanish in my native Nicaragua). So I asked my
father for a book about space. The vague petition made my father produce “The Inventions of the 20 th Century”,
where travels to the stratosphere by little Laika, and to the depths of the ocean in small submarines, and to the
Moon in futuristic space ships, where depicted. Being an electronic engineer my father always found ways to
entertain me with magnets, electricity, silver drops of mercury taken out of a thermometer and merged into his
golden wedding ring, and the arcane books on calculus carefully aligned inside his dresser.

The priest writes a final

Curse
Unto the encrypted page. Blank
Becomes red with blood and
The drummer dies in a fast beat to spring
Out of existence

My mom was the mystic, the one who taught me to pray and play games on telepathy, drawing and
painting. The one who promoted me to play in the space ship under the open stairs to the second floor, fight the

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

pirate aliens inhabiting the mango tree, and rescue the prisoners from the invading fire ants spitting acid and
terrifying gamma rays (the same one that had transformed Hulk –in Spanish he was known as La Mole- into the
green gentile monster). This mix of God, Woman, and Country (I always dream with the same barrio with dusty
streets, had a natural inclination to assist the poor, and got into political troubles with governments of the left and
of the right for defending my own views and refusing to be anybody’s puppet), this amalgam of experiences, I
believe, placed me in the direction of mysticism intermingled with science fiction, love and politics that peppers my
writing.

Inside of us all
Our own big bang
Our own big crunch
Mothers closing the eyes before the
evidence that their children are
the murderers, that the world is not one
that they gave birth to co-existing pairs of
cruelty and goodness
freedom and bondage for the
invariable Law of Change to hold

I didn’t truly start publishing until the 1990s, but it was in both, English and Spanish. The hard oficio of the
writer was only really uncovered to me when I entered the MFA Program at UTEP, El Paso in 2007. One class per
semester –and not all semesters- has stretched the completion for me for far more than I anticipated. Yet, it has
been worth every single second. My first collection, “Antologia de Tarde” (Miami, 1990) contained many of the
poems I had written in Nicaragua with themes that could be described as mysticism, lovelore, and the fight for
justice. My last two years of high school were heavily marked by mathematics, music, and literature. In
mathematics, the subjects of analytic geometry, imaginary numbers, derivatives, and calculus were an eureka
experience on the mystery of numbers revealed to me. The history behind calculus was as marvelous a discovery
as the mechanics of the techniques themselves. In literature the Pleiades of writers, from Poe’s Eureka to
Cardenal’s “Praying for Marilyn Monroe”; from Borges’ “El Aleph” and “El Sur” to Baudelaire “Les Fleurs du Mal”
(that was our exam text in French) never ceased to stir all sorts of fires in my imagination, all sorts of sensations in
my body. When coming to the United Sates, all is left behind, except what you have read and lived; what you have
experienced and created. Other collections followed in Miami: ”Genesis y Otras Fantasias” (1991), “Return to
Guatemala” (1992), “Dead Souls” (1997), “God, Woman & Country” (2000), and finally “Dona Nobis Pacem” (2006).
But something was lacking. Like most Nicaraguan writers, I was made on the go, a poet that was street smart, self-

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

made, with no technique, no theory, no formal education, and with a lot of information but no formation. That is
when I applied to the MFA at The University of Texas at El Paso.

In another Universe
Bizarre laws are correct and all we know
Breaks down into seemingly
Incomprehensible illogical paradoxes
To each one his own Law
To each one her own Death

The formation received since 2007 has been enormous. At times, most of the time, to abandon old habits
is impossible, to differentiate technique from voice, to separate the lecture-type tone from the natural experiential
exposition, is difficult. To engage the reader and co-create with her demands the erasure of the self, the
reinvention of the poet, finding the essence and let it be herself through poetry and fiction. This course on Physics
and Imagination has gone a long way in nurturing the formation I sorely lack.

Throughout the years, my fascination with science and the fiction behind it (as well as the other way
around) has taken me to amass a collection of 1950s Sci-Fi movies, the entire Start Trek motion pictures, and books
on the formation of the universe, space, time, a subscription to Scientific American, and three of my journals filled
with musings on metaphysics, science, and a combination of the two. This course uncovered, recovered, or
discovered for me entire deep mines on the subjects that wait to be written, re-written, or over-written in more
ways than one.

I had read “A Brief History of Time” (Bantam 1988) and “The Universe in a Nutshell” (Bantam 2001) as
soon as they were published, re-reading them was refreshing: they are not the same when approached with the
curiosity of an aficionado than with the magnifying lens of a writer in formation, the challenge off an instructor,
and the support and incredible commentary and varied viewpoints of peers walking the same path to creativity in
the MFA. BHT stopped being the story of black holes and the beginning of the universe (in my book the portrait of
a much younger Stephen Hawking is missing, my daughter cut is out for a report on black holes she did in middle
school) to become an everyday language approach to otherwise complicated matters on cosmology and physics for
most lay people. The diagrams are not as good as that in The Universe in a Nuthshell, which brims with colors and
graphics. Hawking’s explanations of the expanding universe, the Uncertainty Principle, elementary particles, and
his ideas on black holes, the origin and fate of the universe, the direction of time (which is referred to in one of Star
Trek Next Generation episodes) and the God Paradox, acquired a new meaning with this second reading. Poetry
and fiction stopped being the liberation medium, an expression tool, a deliverance tool, an explication of self, and
started being an explanation of Reality, a creation of realities, a modus operandi, the essence of self, the inevitable

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

point from which all vectors emanate and all vectors converge, like the continuing pulse of God we call Big Bang-
Bing Crunch continually recurring ad infinitum. That is to me the Eternal Return: the infinite coexistence in infinite
levels within and without.

“The man called the Master purged the manuscript of everything in the image of its author, in the image of its vanity, the only
trait holding his frail being together; he excised the ephemeral reflections, as in a stagnant pool, of Yeshua Krochal’s
pockmarked face, the blue circles under his eyes, his lethargic body”

The Story of the Master and the Disciple, in The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Danilo Kis

The lines converged from infinity

Into being. They became entangled for
A while. One day they started to
Go astray, wander, pulled by gravitational fields. They became parallel.
Until one day they went back into
Infinity, like asymptotes losing
Sight of each other. That is, my dear, the story of many loves.

I have no talent, but my perseverance scares me. This perseverance brought upon me the most diverse
returns: from many embarrassing moments to deeply appreciated gratifications. In each, the Laws of Kosmos are
manifested. As in Leonard Shlain’s “Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light” (Harper Perennial
2007) where he masterfully dissects the methods and concepts, the phenomena equally studied by art and physics
(theology and science?), the situations I lived, the books by others, the Tertullian discussions with fellow poets and
students of engineering and architecture, musicians and painters, revolutionaries and priests, taught me that
reality is an illusion, that the universe is the same. It is only studied with different methods by cosmology and
physics. To the poet the moon is inspiration, to the physicist a satellite. To the physicist the color white is the
amalgam of all rays in the spectrum visible to our eye; to the poet it is color of royal lineage and the lagoon in the
eyes of the beloved. Which one is more real? The historical tour Shlain takes us from the origins of art and physics
(in the beginning art and science were one and the same) to their separation or specialization, stresses one fact:
we have come to acquire an incomplete and partitioned perception of the world. Arthur Eddington’s explanation
of light might be the same as those of the Impressionists, but the uses are so vastly different!

I am a neutrino
Passing through eternity

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

Without ever dwelling or interacting

With anybody or anything
Is that a blessing or a curse?

In 1993 Bantam published “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?” by
Leon Lederman. I did not found him particularly funny (now, Richard Feynman, that! is a funny guy! Look for
“Feynman at his Best”, which includes a live CD with one of his lectures and thousands of laughs). TGP is the story
of the Higgs bosom, one of the cornerstones of the quantum particles map. I was more curious about Peter Higgs
himself. The Higgs boson explains why all other particles have mass and is fundamental to a complete
understanding of matter. The course has definitely piqued my brain and curiosity and inspired new fiction or re-
working of old fiction in my journals (my journals are like a mine I go to frequently). There is a little known movie,
“The Theory of Everything” (Affirm Films, Sony Pictures 2006) that revolves around this push and pull between
religion and physics and makes simple although too quick, references and explanations to The God Particle and

other formulations of interest as writers and MFAistas (see also the movie π , 1998 directed by Darren Aronofski).

“The Elegant Universe” (Vintage 2003) by physicist Brian Greene is graphically less boring than BHT but
much more dull than Universe in a Nutshell. Except that after almost 20 years since BHT, the amount of
information filtered to the public is immense. It was in here that I learned about string theory and superstrings
(which may explain the 11-dimensional universe and the “invisibility” of more than 4 dimensions to the human
brain), an expanded explanation of M-Theory (its creator Witten said in the film version that he just made up the
name, even though Greene says it came from Mother-of-all-Theories-Theory for membrane, matrix, etc.), and
black holes, Riemann’s geometry, Calabi-Yau shapes (which inspired my short story “The Squandering” in another
MFA course). We are still very far from deciphering the Mind of God, we keep finding clues every day and inventing
new tools –mechanical like the supercollider and intellectual like M-Theory- in an asymptotic approximation to
understand –apprehend in the words of Einstein- the workings of spacetime.

When time warps around

Your tongue, a curly sensation
Unfolds
Your eyes stare
My lips follow you
The sun acquires a higher
temperature

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

The many concepts of time explored by Alan Lightman in “Einstein’s Dreams” (Random 1992) compete
with Borges’ concept of the circularity of time (cyclical, recurrent as in the story “16 April 1905”), except that the
bard had no solid physics base (although of his mathematical intuition there is no doubt). This cyclical nature of
time had been explored in Hindu philosophy, Egyptian religion, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer philosophical work,
and Poincare’s theorems. The all-containing El Aleph and the erudite Tlӧn Uqbar Orbis Tertius (where philosophy,
mathematics, logic, and language are equally important) allude to this concept of the eternal return. Dream time
and real time are the elements I tried to explore in “The Spiral Dream of Milton Miranda” and in “In Theory”.

When the National Guard of Anastasio Somoza broke into my house, they took or destroyed my entire
collection of books, among them, Borges’ Obra Completa and many other books by Julio Cortazar, Garcia Marquez,
Augusto Monterroso, etc. Equally lost were my books on architecture. Luckily, books can be replaced and they live
in our memory (mental and emotional) forever, giving birth to variations we dream or invent in the hidden nooks
of the brain. Only memory and the passing of time allowed me to recover this treasure. I’ve been able to recover El
Aleph in a newer edition (Emece 2006), Tlӧn Uqbar Orbis Tertius and many others (Fondo de Cultura Economica
1981), and “Todos los Fuegos el Fuego” (Punto de Lectura 1995). In the last one, the concept of particles
entanglement can be discovered.

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason”

Novalis
Between One and Zero, lays infinite
Between the folds of my cortex
Old secrets lurk in the shadows
They jump from energy discharge to
Energy discharge
Miniature lightings that
Sing and dance

In Kafka’s “The Top” I saw a metaphor of the physicists trying to comprehend the Mind of God by
sectioning and freezing only a portion of a Universe in constant motion and change. In “The Street Window” I saw
a metaphor of the scientist (or writer?) trying to “see” and understand through the window of reason and
imagination the structure of the Kosmos. The uncertain dialogue that Michael Frayn theorizes in “Copenhagen”
between Bohr and Heisenberg is to me a metaphor of the continued conjectures humans create through
mythology, religion, science and fiction between God and God: does God think and debate with Himself His origin,
destiny, and purpose? Are we made in the image of God or did we make God in the image of us?

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

Alfredo exposed the door of this course by calling “the challenges and opportunities to open up more
neurological paths allowing more light in the brain”. Michelle put it differently by returning (eternally?) to past
experiences and affirming “Everything interests me, I only hope that I can turn a curiosity towards physics into
something more than a conversation on narcotics, into metaphor and revisit the ideas that consumed me once”. I
have never received such significant and valuable input into my writing like Silvana’s both from the technical-
scientific as well as the technical-literary viewpoints. Monica’s “Five Physicists in a Nutshell” taught me the power
of synthesis not just of historical contexts but of literature and scientific discovery. Daniel opened for me a brain
pathway with his references to Borges and “El Milagro Secreto” and pointing to the way how scientists use literary
metaphor (their common field with poets) to make mathematical concepts accessible. Marlena summed up for me
the essence of “What the Bleep do we Know?” when saying that “reality is just a possibility” (or many possibilities
all occurring at once, but only the one the observer fixes on actually “happens” in the brain, the instrument of the
mind). Maria’s assertion that “maybe we will arrive at a Unified Theory of Everything, which means we’ll have
achieved omniscience: but a human omniscience” is to me fascinating: divine omniscience versus human
omniscience, to know all we can know as humans, yet still know nothing when compared to the Mind of God; the
Tree of Knowledge as a tiny fruit of Paradise (is that the real Paradise Lost? To have no challenge left?). One of my
favorite assignments is Lisa’s #4 and what could be construed as Laws: a) words are things, b) home isn’t a place, c)
a love triangle is not a square, and her vivid description of the Miami I so much miss. Margarita’s Spanish posts
were always refreshing and intriguing, like when she affirms: “Por ahora, simplemente puedo decir que me alegra
que la idea de las 11 dimensiones y los universos-membrana paralelos sean una hipótesis muy bien anclada en las
distintas versiones matemáticas de la Teoría de las Cuerdas, Supercuerdas, y/o la Teoría-M. Faltaría preguntarnos
si ¿acaso en la historia de cosmos anterior al mundo que hoy conocemos (ATB y anterior a la nucleo-síntesis, o en
la pre-historia del Big Bang, o en las hipótesis cosmológicas equivalentes) no participamos de otras dimensiones y
por eso hoy sus indicios aparecen en nuestros cálculos?”. Doesn’t that sound like remnants of past lives? Doesn’t it
carry the weight of echoes of past universes and ghost particles scientists are searching for?

Calabi-Yau, Feynman, Uncertainty Principle, are only three of the concepts/ideas/themes or interests I
think Sahalie and I have in common. The description of neutrino is so poetic: “I like the word “neutrino.” Even the
name sounds light. It reminds me of something that could just be brushed away, like it would never choose one
side of an argument; would never stoop to something so weighty”. KC’s description of the large-scale double-slit
experiment happening in her house was to me very attractive as was the way she thinks about photons bouncing
around the air, walls, doors and floors. When discussing Lederman, Laura brings down the whole Descartes-ian
principle of “Cogito, Ergu Sum”, for we apparently cannot know if what we think or see is real or not. That sole
notion is both, scary and dumbfounding at once. I was also stricken by Hilda’s “Palabras Esfera”, the narrative hints
to me a fine thread of the music of the spheres, the music of Chopin, the labyrinths of language, and the
mathematics behind it all.

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

Poe’s prose-poem Eureka reminds me the attempt Teilhard de Chardin made to grasp the nature of the
universe, the former with the tool of reason, the latter with the tool of faith, both with minimal or no scientific
training. The short “The Power of Words” is another attempt of Poe’s to understand surrounding reality using the
dialogue between Agathos and Oinos. Both are somehow related to William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
(published almost 50 years earlier), except that Blake was a definitely more mystical poet, not to mention the
illustrations and language mixed media (prose and poetry) he uses. Also I believe Poe’s work was shallow and
detectivesque while Blake’s is more akin to Dante’s Inferno in its grand scale. Pynchon’s “Entropy” is, in form and
content, a metaphor of the physics phenomenon of chaos (the party, the booze, the bird, the temperature). I must
confess that “The Joy of Writing” was my first contact with Wisława Szymborska. She made me see that the chaos
of life can be expressed in simple words, yet resembling the complexity around, within, among, and between us.

Is there then a world

where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

Wislawa Szymborska, “The Joy of Writing”

To end with a diagram, I believe that if we want to access reality (whatever we make of it) we must be
resort to an array of tools: reason and imagination, faith and intuition, proof and revelation. Scientific claim that
mathematics only has the explanation of the Universe is at least presumptuous. All math does is provide a model.
Their explanation of reality is model-dependent. In other words, there are as many scientific explanations of the
Universe as models we can conceive and all are just theories. Quantum Field Theory is the most recent and less
inconsistent (its electron-proton interaction predictions are within 10 8 of accuracy) so far, the latest holon in the
long chain of being:
Universe

Y
Y
Planetary
System
X
X
Z
Z
Inertial Frame of Reference
Inertial Frame of Reference
Y
Nebulae

X
Z
Inertial Frame of Reference

Black Hole

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

Quantum mechanics offers an infinite field of possibilities –all of which may already be
Forces: happening. The Laws of Physics that govern the Forces are valid in all regions of the
Electromagnetic
Nuclear Weak
Universe (black holes, nebulae, planetary systems) whether be it as small as a pea or as
Nuclear Strong big as a galaxy cluster, in other words, in all frames of reference. That is why it is called a
+
Gravity “relativistic” theory.

Since we cannot travel (make a transition to and from) all the frames of reference, we
resort to mathematics to predict the behavior and test the laws in each frame and to travel or transition between
those frames. To move from one frame to another we use the Poincare Transformations, which are sets of
equations. The process is loosely thus: A) define an abstract mathematical structure (Poincare Group) that follows
certain mathematical laws or symmetries on how the Group operates. B) Describe the symmetries using equations,
which enable the representation of the Poincare Group into a concrete mathematical space or representation
space. C) Choose one representation space among the infinite possible representation spaces (also known as
Hilbert space). D) This chosen representation space must be a Unitary Representation, for only unitary
representation spaces have physical meaning. E) Reduce the chosen unitary representation space to its minimal
mathematical expression, called irreducible representation. Voila! This smallest representation describes the
everyday behavior of matter: measurable physical fields. We have created mathematical representation of matter
and have devised equations that describe how matters behaves. We can now predict the path of photons, the
attraction of gravity, the Laws of Physics. In other words, we have created a Model of Reality, but bear in mind,
these is only one among a theoretically Infinite number of models we can create of matter, the universe, reality.
These are abstract mathematical structures that model what we are trying to apprehend. We are looking into a
mirror, which is reflecting a mirror, which is reflecting a mirror, which is reflecting a mirror, which is reflecting…
Borges had this intuition, or like Hindus would say: the world is carried by an elephant, this elephant is carried by
another elephants, and it is elephants all the way down!

^ = physical properties.
U1, only unitary spaces have physical meaning
Convert ^ to equations.
^ ^ ^^^^
^^^^^^
Equations: are a
Reduce U1 to its irreducible
Poincare Group. representation.
U2
This irreducible representation
Use Poincare Groups
is a Mathematical Model of
physical matter and describes
to travel from U1 to U2.
its behavior.
Equations describe symmetries

Of the Group. Infinite representation spaces

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Prof. Chacon
Physics and Imagination
Adolfo Danilo Lopez
4/26/2010

In closing

In the movie The Passion of the Christ, by Mel Gibson, Pontius Pilate asks qui est veritas? One might as
well ask, What is Reality? The same way physicists ask what material reality is and search for its representations via
mathematical models, we writers question reality and represent it via language, fiction and poetry. We do not look
for a mere understanding of matter; we want to find the transcendental meaning and purpose of matter and spirit.
Quantum physics stirs our imagination to find more ways of expression of this inner search. We at the same time
feed physicists imagination to look beyond reason in order to apprehend the Mind of God. Physicists have resorted
to writers’ language of fiction to convey their ideas and search results to a wider audience, to disseminate their
knowledge and communicate their angst for answers. We meet in the common field of language. Mathematics is
no longer a barrier. Working together God’s infinitude is at hand.

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