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See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poem Questioning Atoms through Inference live at Ruffled Feathers at Reno in Chicago 12/8/14 (Canon camera, with balance, crop, and saturate filters)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poem Questioning Atoms through Inference live at Ruffled Feathers at Reno in Chicago 12/8/14 (Canon, balance)

See YouTube video of Chicago poet Janet Kuypers reading her 2 new poems “Violations tested” and “Violations in the name of love” then her intro poem “Questioning Atoms through Inference” to her book “The Periodic Table of Poetry” (read from the book) 2/10/18 at Georgetown’s “Poetry Aloud” (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix 2500 camera).

See YouTube video of Chicago poet Janet Kuypers reading her 2 new poems “Violations tested” and “Violations in the name of love” then her intro poem “Questioning Atoms through Inference” to her book “The Periodic Table of Poetry” (read from the book) 2/10/18 at Georgetown’s “Poetry Aloud” (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera).

Questioning Atoms through Inference Janet Kuypers 10/30/14 Whenever you start teaching a class like this, you say, “We never measure an object, we measure the properties of an object.” Because when it comes to learning some things, we can only guess, when there’s only so much research we can do, and that’s when everything’s a guessing game. # Remember chemistry class, learning about atoms and seeing rings of “shells” of electrons surrounding protons and neutrons in a nucleus? Well, I dare you to actually look inside of an atom, because no one has ever done it. When chemists zoom in close enough, the see the atom as a fuzzy spot, and that’s all. Just a spot. Nothing else. So how do they know what is inside of the atom, and how do they know how an atom looks? # People probably remember chemistry class as a boring memorization of stats (that they can’t for the life of them remember anymore). And that’s the funny thing about testing the limits of science, because when you’ve witnessed as much as you can about things, it’s time to start theorizing. And when it comes to the atom, yes, a lot of it’s based on science, of course, but some of it is expanding your mind to beyond what you can physically see to learn what makes everything ... everything, and how everything actually works. # In the 1800s, English chemist John Dalton found matter was actually made of “lumpy particles” (those were the atoms), but almost a century later the English physicist J.J. Thomson discovered the electron (don’t ask me how he discovered it, they don’t explain that in “History of the Atom 101”). He postulated there was positive energy in these atoms, and there were also negative energy particles. But then, by 1900 Max Planck was vibrating atoms, heating them ’til they glowed, and that’s how they first measured the energy from these particles. By 1912 Danish physicists Neils Bohr Said, “Here’s some rules that seem impossible, but they describe the way atoms operate, so let’s pretend they’re correct and use them.” So he explained orbital shells of electrons. And really, this is how it happened. # So, while I was sitting at a bar at the Notre Dame Campus, I asked a science-geek history buff If anyone has actually seen inside an atom. And he said, now, when I talk like this, I say, “We never measure an object, we measure the properties of an object.” So, it seems that we never actually see inside an atom, but we can guess what it’s like by the way it reacts when we mess with it enough. Fascinating. That sounds kind of like some relationships I’ve had in the past. Potentially messy, but really intriguing when you think you finally figured it all out.

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