The Poetry Box

Energy and Nothingness

Energy and Nothingness

(2 customer reviews)

by K. D. Vallejo

COMING SOON!
Official Release: Nov 4, 2025

ISBN: 978-1-968610-07-4
Publisher: The Poetry Box
Paperback, 96 pages

SKU: 978-1-968610-07-4 Category: Tags: , , ,

Description

 

Energy and Nothingness
Poems for the First One Hundred Years of Quantum Mechanics

 

by K. D. Vallejo

Energy and Nothingness: Poems for the First One Hundred Years of Quantum Mechanics by K. D. Vallejo is a profound collection that bridges the realms of science, philosophy, and poetry. This evocative work delves into fundamental questions about existence, such as the universe’s origins and ultimate fate, the nature of energy, time, and consciousness. It examines complex scientific concepts like quantum mechanics, dark matter, and nothingness, weaving them with philosophical inquiries into knowledge and reality. The poems reflect on humanity’s quest for understanding the order of the universe through scientific inquiry, transforming abstract scientific principles into tangible, thought-provoking verse. The reader will enjoy taking a unique journey through the mysteries of the universe, seen through a multidisciplinary lens.

Early Praise

Energy and Nothingness is a remarkable offering— a poetic archive of quantum mechanics rendered through human story. Vallejo’s poems do not explain physics; they illuminate it. These are field notes from the strange terrain between certainty and chance, presence and absence. Through them, the people and paradoxes of quantum science flicker into view— fragile, flawed, and full of wonder.

—Prof. Sam Illingworth, academic, poet, and founder of Consilience

Scientific ideas first start as myth, as poetry. But what if a scientist writes beautiful poems? Don’t you want to know what lies beneath it all and what we’ll see in one hundred years? Maybe in one hundred years, new science will arise from these poetic ideas—but meanwhile, read this book, feel it, enjoy it. Read it when you are happy, read it when the dark around you is heavy—and let this book engulf you with the spirit of creation!

—Dr. Vladik Kreinovich, professor of Computer Science (and poetry aficionado)

Energy and Nothingness is sharp, provocative, and unlike anything else in print and could be considered an update on Lucretius, poetry “on the nature of things.” Here you will find poems that stretch the reader’s mind to the far corners of what is known and then point beyond.

—William Seaton, poet, author of Planetary Motions

A captivating collection. Through Energy and Nothingness, the author reveals a deeply personal bond with physics while inviting us to rediscover its foundational ideas in a fresh light, infused with creative expression. As they so eloquently put it, Words that have sufficient friends to be known everywhere we go, but not with enough family to get an in-depth picture of their whole identity, each poem mirrors the paradoxes at the intersection of physics and reality—at once familiar and unfathomable. These finely wrought verses explore rich layers and complex concepts, weaving imagery with insight and poetic imagination. Here, method meets metaphor, and like vacuum fluctuations, language sparks a new wonder in space, time, and energy.

—Dr. Ashmeet Singh, PhD in Physics, creator of The Scribbled Equation

 

 

 

About the Author

  1. D. Vallejo is from the Ciudad Juarez/El Paso border community, currently residing in Idaho Falls. He is interested in the aesthetic space where science, philosophy, and language meet. Kevin is a reviewer and member of the editorial team of Consilience, and his work has been featured in Beyond Queer Words, Menagerie 208, The Marbled Sigh, and the technical journals Reports of Progress in Physics, ACS Nano, among others. His previously published collection minus one twelfth can be found now. Kevin daylights as a condensed matter physicist, stacking atoms for a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory.

Additional information

Weight 8 oz
Dimensions 6 × 9 × .2 in
ISBN

978-1-968610-07-4
Pages

96
Wholesale

worldwide via INGRAM (after Nov 4 2025)

Sample Poem

Epilogue: Imagine What You Will Know Tomorrow

The limits of the world are where my breath
is insufficient to allow me to be upset.
And endless ocean is all around our land.
To leave these shores and learn what lies beyond,
abandoning the comfort of your home,
makes sailors out of all of those who go.
An earthly shadow on the lunar disk
through numbers an immensity revealed:
more than twenty times around the globe
a trip would take to go from Earth to Moon.
Continuing the path of reason made
us want to know the distance to the sun,
and if its light was what we yearned to know
the cost of stellar travel would decrease.
Alas, the eyes of Aristarchus failed
to differentiate the stars’ short dance.
And still, his legacy with us remains:
a way to measure high above the sky.
The spheres remained two thousand years until
the polished glass became our eyes to see:
away from war and from the market did
Professor Galilei focused his gaze.
He saw so many stars that escaped our eyes
they casted doubt on where our planet sat.
If they were all as fiery as our sun
the starry messenger could now get shot.
Three hundred fifty years ago we learned
that Mars is half as far as is the Sun:
Cassini made our solar system’s size
explode—the planets suddenly were gone.
And less than just two hundred years ago,
the universe, no longer spheres, was still
both infinite and small, beginning-less,
confined to just how far the stars could be.
Then opening his eyes at night Olbers
discovered that in darkness, boundaries
had to exist, for light had gone extinct
despite the seemingly unending light.
In eighteen hundred thirty-eight, a team
of scholars independently found out
how far the stars could truly be from us
succeeding where the Greek eyes couldn’t see.
Struve, Henderson and Bessel
six months apart measured two stars
the distance between earth and sun: a joke
three hundred thousand times beyond they were.
The whispers of a dance Ms. Leavitt heard
in order to understand how far they are:
the universe is now the Milky Way
and ninety thousand times as big—as vast.
Still, the universe
has always been.
And after seven years went by: a war,
so big the world appeared to be too small,
came in and went. One hundred years ago
a nebula would make the cosmos huge.
The lawyer who, dissatisfied with law,
returned to look up at the sky, found out
Andromeda did not contain just dust.
Another galaxy, its own!
Another vast number of stars – alone
no more the Milky Way would be.
As Hubble searched the universe enlarged
the galaxies he found were going away
and from the colors on his plates he saw
our neighborhood to be just one of them.
The universe is now two billion years
because if galaxies can leave, it means
some time ago much closer they had been:
a moment of creation has emerged.
Ironically, on Earth the rocks told us
they had been hanging out three billion years.
Static is the universe no more:
as galaxies and stars precess and dance
so does the space on which they float around
they grow apart as marks on a balloon.
A little over eighty years have past:
our math has been refined through telescopes,
and satellites that see beyond the sky.
The cosmos in its current size has gone
to be three hundred times as large… again.
And we suspect its age to be fourteen
billion years of age: it went from endless,
eternal being, to the longest time
in just the span of this last century.
We went from knowledge of our cave and tree
to stars that hang above the sky at night,
from solar system to our galaxy,
to vastness greater than what we can see.
Imagine what we’ll see in one hundred years.

2 reviews for Energy and Nothingness

  1. Curtis –

    If time only moves forward, then how am I reviewing this book prior to release?

  2. Eugene Engmann –

    These collection of poems beautifully stretch the meaning of science with words that seem to consume the reader. They create a mental picture so simple, yet so ecstatic! A great work of art, and an indulging read!

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