Tag: Sunday Poem

Sunday Science Poem: The Future Will Be Like Disney World

IBM Pavilion New York World's Fair 1964-65May Swenson’s ‘The People Wall’ (1967)

In 1965, if you wanted to see what the future was going to look like, you could go to the New York World’s Fair. Under the giant green Moon Dome of the Transportation & Travel Pavilion, you could see the future of space travel; at the DuPont exhibit, you could see futuristic fabrics featured in a musical comedy about chemistry; at the Hall of Science, kids could play radioactive waste disposal in Atomsville, USA; and at the General Motors Futurama II exhibit, you could watch vacationers lounging in underwater cities, and see how in the future trees will be felled with laser beams.

One of the more spectacular exhibits was IBM’s People Wall, a giant grandstand that lifted the visitors into a spectacular “gunite-spayed steel egg, about the size of a Navy blimp,” where they would be bombarded with futuristic images on 14 different screens in what was supposed to be a visual display of state-of-the-art computer data processing. (I have no idea what gunite is, but it sounds futuristic.) Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: The Future Will Be Like Disney World”

Sunday Science Poem: Outward Exploration and Our Inner Passage to India

Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India” (1871)

ColombusMapWhat does our drive to explore and discover tell us about our inner landscape?

Walt Whitman’s poem “Passage to India” takes as its launching point three astoundingly ambitious projects to connect the world in the mid-19th Century: the transatlantic telegraph cable, the Suez Canal, and the U.S. transcontinental railroad. These are “the great achievements of the present,” but to understand their full meaning, Whitman tells us we need to turn to the past – to the dreams and aspirations of earlier explorers and visionaries, who launched us into the present, and whose restlessness tells us about our own psychic composition.

The past shows us that humans have always been dissatisfied with boundaries, “Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,/ With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts”: prehistoric humans expanding out of Africa into Asia and Europe; following mammoths over the frozen Siberian tundra; trekking across to what is now Alaska and down the entire Western Hemisphere; sailing to remote Pacific Islands in what to us seem like insanely inadequate vessels that are are little more than rafts. Are these external explorations a manifestation of our struggles with some unexplored internal landscape?

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Outward Exploration and Our Inner Passage to India”

Sunday Science Poem: The Two Apes of Brueghel

pieter-bruegel-the-elder-two-chained-monkeys-1I’ve discussed this poem before, but you may have missed it, in which case it will be, as NBC says, new to you. The Sunday Poem will be back next week with completely new material.

This is one of my favorite poems by the Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska (1923-2011). All I have to say about this poem is that a monkey rattling a chain is never a good thing, especially at a thesis committee update. 

The Two Apes of Brueghel (1957), 

So appears my big graduation exam dream:
In a window sit two monkeys fixed by chains,
Beyond the window the sky flies
And the sea splashes.

The subject is the history of mankind.
I stammer and flail.

One monkey, gazing at me, ironically listens,
The second seems to doze -
But when after a question comes silence,
It prompts me
By softly clinking the chain.

Translation from the Polish by yours truly.
Image: Pieter Bruegel’s “Two Chained Monkeys” (1525)

Sunday Science Poem: Lord Byron’s Post-Apocalyptic Vision

‘Darkness’, Lord Byron (1816)

HubertLouvreRuinsDarwin’s argument for evolution by natural selection gets a lot of attention as the science bombshell of the 19th century that shocked the sensibilities of Victorian society, but there was an equally consequential, if less dramatic, scientific development that took place much earlier in the century, a development that left a deep impression on the generation before Darwin: William Herschel’s discovery that the universe is much bigger and much older than nearly anyone had imagined.

William Herschel’s scientific findings, made with his ever larger telescopes, were a frequent target of Romantic poets’ imaginations, and towards the end of his career, Herschel’s speculations about the past and future of the cosmos fed Romantic angst over the role of God and humanity in what now seemed to be a jaw-droppingly vast cosmic stage.

Among Herschel’s more disturbing ideas is the notion of a natural end to the Milky Way. As Richard Holmes notes in The Age of Wonder, Herschel jarred the poet Thomas Campbell by explaining that the night sky was filled with “many distant stars [that] had probably ‘ceased to exist’ millions of years ago, and that looking up into the night sky we were seeing a stellar landscape that was not really there at all. The sky was full of ghosts.”1 Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Lord Byron’s Post-Apocalyptic Vision”

Sunday Science Poem: Emily Dickinson and the Experiment of Consciousness

Emily Dickinson’s # 822

PurkinjeCellHow much consciousness is necessary for experience? Does a lobster or E. coli have experience, or does experience exist only with more awareness, awareness not just of the environment, the direction of a food source or a competitor for a mate, but awareness of self, of the passage of time, of the past, and of the alternative possibilities of the future?

In # 822, Emily Dickinson describes experience as an experiment in consciousness. Each of us, as a consciousness, is aware of environment (‘the Sun’), our fellow species members (‘Neighbors’). We share this basic level of awareness with much of the living world. A much rarer awareness, probably existing only in some vertebrates, is self-awareness (‘itself’ is used five times in this poem of 67 words), and awareness of death.

Beyond self-awareness, we have a capability for mental experimentation that is only possible with language, and is thus probably unique among organisms. Here is how Daniel Dennett illustrates this capacity: Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Emily Dickinson and the Experiment of Consciousness”