Tag: science poetry

Sunday Science Poem: Science and doubt on the naked shingles of the world

Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’

Dover BeachFor at least a millennium in the West, Christianity was the dominant public perspective on how the world operates. That is no longer true. In our culture, science now explains the world.

Despite widespread private expressions of piety, in our public culture science is what we believe. Intelligent design, fad diets, ESP, or any other ideas that make a go at competing on science’s materialistic home turf all end up measured by science’s standard. This is why pseudo-science exists: you have to dress your ideas in a lab coat and protective eyewear if you want other people to believe your ideas about the physical world. That was not true when Victoria inherited the British throne in 1838, but it was largely true when she died in 1901. This was the result of a tectonic shift in the psychology of an entire society, and Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ captures the mental anguish of that shift. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Science and doubt on the naked shingles of the world”

Sunday Science Poem: Cloning and other ways of taking adaptive matters into our own hands

Sally Van Doren’s ‘Adaptive’

VanDorenPOSSESSIVE_covfront_sized-300x450With the latest improvements in the technology for creating cloned human embryos, the science fiction idea of human clones is no longer quite so speculative. (Cloning livestock is not only not speculative, it’s almost routine.) In the near future we will have the ability to create, with the technologies of genome editing and cloning, upgraded versions of ourselves – in other words, taking our adaptation to our environment into our own hands, rather than simply accepting what we’ve been handed by evolution.1

Changing the meaning of our DNA to make a new version of ourselves parallels the much less ethically dubious process of reading a poem by deliberately adapting its meaning to our needs and interests as readers. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Cloning and other ways of taking adaptive matters into our own hands”

Sunday Science Poem: Abstraction is crucial in science and poetry

Newton-WilliamBlakeI recently heard a presentation by the Caltech biophysicist Rob Phillips, in which he issued a challenge to those who claim biology, in contrast to physics, is too complex and messy to be understood with mathematical theories: take a look at Tycho Brahe’s 16th century astronomical data, and see if you can make sense of it without math. Take a look at the data, and see if you can demonstrate, without a mathematical theory, that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse.*

In order to understand the messy real world, scientists use abstractions that can be quite distant from our everyday experiences. The historians of science Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield explain how this was crucial to Newton’s method:

[W]here Aristotle’s theory of motion was based on familiar, everyday principles, Newton’s was stated in terms of abstract mathematical ideals. The circling heavens, a falling stone, smoke rising from a fire, the steady progress of a horse and cart: these were the objects by comparison with which Aristotle explained other kinds of motions. For Newton, on the other hand, the explanatory paradigm was a kind of motion we never encounter in real life. Nothing ever actually moves uniformly and free of all forces, at a steady speed and in a constant Euclidian direction. Yet Newton was able to bring together the threads left loose by his predecessors by systematically applying just this abstract idea of ‘natural’ motion. So far from being guided by experience alone, he could not afford to be too much tied down to the evidence of his senses, or to the results of experiments: it was, rather Aristotle who stuck too closely to the facts. Newton was ready to imagine something which was practically impossible and treat that as his theoretical ideal.

Musicians, artists, and poets have also found that abstraction is crucial. The abstract features make it tough for most of us to grasp modern works. Jacques Barzun explained it this way:

Like the would-be purist in art, the scientist takes a concrete experience and by an act of abstraction brings out a principle that may have no resemblance to the visible world… Poets and prosaists, whether Abolitionist, Decadent, or Symbolist, found that to create works adequate to their vision the language must be recreated.

If we recognize the common role of abstraction in art and in science, the baffling poetry of someone like Arthur Rimbaud begins to make much more sense.

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Abstraction is crucial in science and poetry”

Sunday Science Poem: Reproduction will beat Armageddon

gassmiddlecLast Tuesday I made my way to Left Bank Books, a St. Louis favorite, to listen to William Gass read from his newest book, Middle C. As some readers may know, I am a fan, or maybe even a connoisseur of post-apocalyptic fiction; thus Gass really caught my attention when he read one of the most searing scenes of apocalypse survival I’ve ever encountered, something that makes most works in the post-apocalyptic genre seem exuberantly upbeat.

While this scene is not written as a poem, it is one long sentence written with the attention to cadence and sound that you expect of poetry, and so it qualifies for this week’s Sunday Poem. As for a possible science-related theme, aside from the association I see with my favorite subgenre of science fiction, this passage from Middle C describes the narrator’s speculation that the human species will somehow, despite losing Armageddon, squeak through with its fundamental biological drive to reproduce intact. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Reproduction will beat Armageddon”

Sunday Science Poem: Big Dumb Objects, Arthur C. Clake, John Keats, and the Sublime

RamaThe purpose of the Big Dumb Object in science fiction is to cure us of our familiarity with the universe. We tend to forget that the universe is complex, vast, exotic, eerie, and downright mystifying. Our daily experiences with its odd phenomena constitute what is normal, and normal is, of course, that which we’re inclined to take for granted. Among the bizarre things we accept as normal are the spontaneous development of a child into an adult, our ability to perceive coherent images and sounds that reach us through a tangled mess of reflecting waves, that there “are mountains in Chile, and not a hill in La Plata,” and the fortunate fact that Jupiter hasn’t yet sent the Earth spinning out of the Solar System.

Big Dumb Objects are metaphors that regenerate the strangeness of the universe in order remind us that a strange universe is a necessary condition for the sublime experience of scientific discovery. Two writers who knew this well were Arthur C. Clarke and John Keats. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Big Dumb Objects, Arthur C. Clake, John Keats, and the Sublime”