Tag: Sunday Poem

Sunday Science Poem: We live in the casts of our imaginations

Wallace Stevens’ ‘Description Without Place’

779px-William_Blake_-_Isaac_Newton_-_WGA02217Science works by making models of the world. We need models, because the data rarely speak for themselves.

As individuals, we also work by making mental models of of the world, both at the automatic, neurobiological level where the brain assembles representations of the world from the neural impulses transmitted by our sensory organs, and at the conscious, conceptual level, the level where we consciously try, with limited information, to decide what’s going on in the world around us. Models mediate between us and reality.

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: We live in the casts of our imaginations”

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 Poem outsourced to The New York Review of Books

I’m traveling with limited internet access, but it’s National Poetry Month. That means it’s not hard to find good poetry on the internet. For this week, let me direct you to The New York Review of Books’ feature on John Ashbury.

To whet your appetite, here are some technological metaphors for Ashbury’s process of creating poetry:

[S]omething irrevocably and personally fastidious does emerge from the industrial process which digests his love of art deco and old B movies, and—to quote Webster’s dictionary on the term—shows “the progress of materials through various stages by means of a manufacturing process.” That “schematic diagram,” claims the jacket copy, is “nothing less than the entire poem itself.”

Industry is now old hat in poetry, but perhaps not quite in this sense. Ashbery’s total and seemingly effortless absorption in the dense technology of modern living is a million years away from the days of the Thirties, when poets self-consciously made pylons stride across the uplands like nude giant girls. And yet Ashbery begins with “an emptiness / so sudden it leaves the girders whanging in the absence of wind.” His “newness” has a long history behind it, a history of poetic properties broken down for recycling but suddenly reconstituted in unexpected and effective ways, to lie around like the stranded monster rotting in the reeds of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre.

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”