An astronomers’ meeting turns into a haiku competition
Pick your own winner
IN 2001 Allan Treiman, a researcher at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, in Houston, was working on the one-sentence summary that the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) requires of presenting authors when inspiration struck. To communicate the essence of a paper entitled “The ALTA II Spectrometer: a Tool for Teaching About Light and Remote Sensing”, he wrote down:
Bright leaves on dark sky
Beyond the brilliant rainbow
Vision fades away
The next year Ralph Lorenz, another planetary scientist, followed his lead, summarising “Tectonic Titan: Landscape Energetics and the Thermodynamic Efficiency of Mantle Convection” thus:
Titan’s surface forged,
not by blows but by churning.
Carnot tells us why
And thus was a tradition born. The astronomical followers of Basho have multiplied until, this year, more than 200 of the papers at LPSC have such haiku summaries. Some are purely descriptive:
Remote imaging
Of halite habitats in
Dry Atacama
Some impart lessons:
Counting craters is
Easier when you use a
Supercomputer
Others ask questions both scientific…
Deep within Ceres
Mysteries still confound us
Is it mud or ice?
…and ethical:
Absence of voices
Lost paths, lost thoughts, lost ideas
Who we are missing?
And some go beyond the fun of an in-joke or the satisfaction of word play to evoke a sense of change and cycles very fitting to the form and the orbiting subject matter, as in Renee Weber’s summation of “Thermal Moonquakes: Implications for Surface Properties”:
Sunrise and sunset
Cracking, creaking, and rumbling
The Moon never rests
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Abstract art"
Science & technology March 24th 2018
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