Scientific American - USA (2020-12)

METER
Edited by Dava Sobel

R. WILLIAMS

STScI

, HUBBLE DEEP FIELD TEAM, NASA AND ESA

Staring at

Nothing

— for Dr. Robert Williams, astronomer

What are you staring at? said the mother,

said the cousin, said the teacher to the child—

Nothing, he said. Then his wife asked. Nothing.

Nothing and more nothing and nothing more.

What a waste of time, said his colleagues,

valuable time. People would kill for that.

One December for ten nights and a hundred

hours, he stared at nothing. He looked at where

there wasn’t anything but nothing, more nothing,

and nothing more. Nothing but death and birth

merging into light—collisions of blue,

red, yellow, white. Spirals, ellipticals, nothing

but the universe quintupling in size. What wasn’t

is teeming with galaxies, gleaming innumerably.

It’s nothing, said he. Look at nothing to see.

Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work

has been read on NPR, featured in American Life in Poetry, and

published in journals, among them North American Review, the

Paris Review and the Yale Review. Her latest book of poems is

Rewriting the Body (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018).

24 Scientific American, December 2020

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In December 1995 astronomer Robert Williams took a risk that was mocked by his colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

As director, Williams used his discretionary time with the Hubble Space Telescope to point at nothing—an apparently empty spot of sky—over a 10-day

period. The astounding revelation of thousands of galaxies is now known as the legendary Hubble Deep Field.