The science of poetry, the poetry of science

[brianedwards]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/de ... NETTXT9038

[Tim Love]

Thanks. I hadn't seen this. They could have added that Jo Shapcott's done/doing Science at the Open University, and "Electric Shadow" by Heidi Williamson (Bloodaxe, 2011) has many science-related poems. However, I think the connections are more tenuous than the article suggests, and social forces are at play. In New Scientist (24 July 1999) Graham Farmelo (Science Museum, London) wrote "Be sceptical of any science-art initiative and you are liable to find yourself marked down as a narrow-minded reactionary. If a new work of art is based on a theme related to science, most critics will give it an easy ride... It seems that this flavour of political correctness encourages intellectual laziness, allowing shallow and sentimental nonsense about the relationship to pass for serious thought"

For what it's worth here are 4 articles I've written

• Science and the Arts
• Poetry about Science in the UK
• Poetry, Mathematics, and Computing
• Fractals and Poetry ("Fractals may be the most complex and the most subtle examples of patterns found in both mathematics and poetry ... When poets borrowed ideas from fractal geometry and applied them to the reading and writing of poetry, they made a remarkable intellectual leap")

[brianedwards]

Will definitely look at those Tim, thanks. I do agree that Science is somewhat fashionable these days . . .

Will read those papers and get back to you. Hope others chime in here, I think there are several members with an interest in these things.

B.

[Ros]

I think science has a lot to offer poetry; I'm less convinced about the other way round.

Ros

[Mic]

At the heart of it, poetry and science are the same thing.

Einstein tapped in to the same thing that poets tap into (in my view anyway!) to produce his ideas.

[k-j]

At the heart of it, poetry and science are the same thing.

An inflammatory statement! Both may rely on inspiration to a greater (poetry) or lesser (science) extent. But surely they are quite different things?

If you mean there can be something "scientific" about poetry, and something "poetic" about science, I would agree. But that is a rather poetic way of looking at it. Science involves evidence and proof; poetry emphatically doesn't.

I could be wrong but I would venture that Einstein was probably a very bad poet (just like most people).

[Ros]

At the heart of it, poetry and science are the same thing.

Einstein tapped in to the same thing that poets tap into (in my view anyway!) to produce his ideas.

I'd have to disagree with that. What k-j says: science moves step by step using testable hypotheses which can be repeated. Poetry is surely something else entirely.

Ros

[Mic]

Science involves evidence and proof;

Science, fundamentally, is of course based not on 'proof' but on an agreement to accept that "this + this = that". The steps science takes builds on these (fundamentally unprovable) building blocks (we simply have no choice but to 'believe' in order just to let science begin). Science builds step by step from this unprovable foundation point, with each new breakthrough being overturned by the next.

With the poetry science science poetry thing, I probably am being a little provocative, but my sense is that there is something in this. Einstein talked about 'recieving' much of his thinking. His job was then to give shape to the ideas with words and symbols. When I listen to mathematicians and phsyicists speak on telly, I hear them refer to the 'elegance' of a solution, or their 'repugnance' for e.g. the idea of infinity, or the 'beauty' of the expression of the concept of infinity.

Like poetry, so much of science seems to me to begin with invention and imagination, and then finding a way of crafting or creating a vocabulary around it to give it shape and bring it into 'being'. An example might be the invention of imaginary numbers, or the 'invention' of the concept of 'zero'. The most brilliant scientists often talk about having intuitve flashes/understanding about the way things 'are' and then they create the language, equations, theories around these unworded 'intuitive intensities' retroactively. The proven facts will almost always eventually be overturned.

I'm hungover and rambling somewhat, and am probably being incoherent. I'm not sure if it is especially useful to think about what one might or might not have to 'give' to the other. My feeling is that they are both trying to do the same thing: describing and perhaps even in some senses 'creating' our experience of the world .

Mic

[Mic]

I've just realized that I haven't read the article that began this thread yet.

Mic

[k-j]

What are these fundamentally unprovable building blocks on which the scientific edifice teeters?

As I said, there are obviously examples of "inspiration" or "imagination" in the history of science, some of them famous. But for each apocryphal eureka or apple-tree moment, there are countless hours of research and evidence-based debate. Even when Einstein had his raw "ideas", he still had to sit down and slog through the mathematics of them to demonstrate that the equations worked (which his genius gave him the ability to do), and then other physicists had to take measurements to validate (or invalidate) those equations. It's a grave misconception that science proceeds by sudden leaps of genius, or that "each new breakthrough is overturned by the next." Sometimes this happens, but much more often, new theories refine or augment old ones, and arise out of more precise or extensive empirical research.

I think when mathematicians speak of the "elegance" of a proof, they are expressing the poetic aspect of science to which I alluded before. But there is no requirement for a proof to be elegant; some proofs have no aesthetic merit at all while still being perfectly good proofs. You can't say the same about poems and this is a pretty important difference. Science can be ugly, or just plain-looking, but it does have to be true; whereas poetry (art) can be normative but it does have to make some kind of aesthetic impression.

I haven't read Padel's article yet either. I often forget to read the linked article in a thread like this. Will do this time though.

[k-j]

Not a bad article by Padel. She makes a good point about the importance of metaphor in both fields. To say that both are about "relationships" though, strikes me as rather redundant. I mean isn't everything about relationships?

Overall I agree with Ros: poetry could certainly benefit from taking a more scientific view of the world. I'm not sure that science needs to take a more poetic view of the world. If you say they are the same thing then the compliment is to poetry.

[brianedwards]

Padel isn't saying poetry and science are the same thing though is she? She points out that both make important use of metaphor, and that is simply a statement of fact. Poetry is often about ways of seeing, about cocking the head to one side and finding things anew. k-j's very valid point about the oft-ignored slog of real scientific research notwithstanding, I suspect much great scientific endeavour began with that same "poetic" impulse.

Science is poetic, ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor into its inspirational service.

[k-j]

Padel isn't saying poetry and science are the same thing though is she?

No, not at all. That was mic (and me taking up the cudgels).

[brianedwards]

Ahh, right. Sorry, lost the thread a little bit.

Now, must get round to checking out Tim's articles.

B.

[Raincoat]

Science, fundamentally, is of course based not on 'proof' but on an agreement to accept that "this + this = that".

Essentially yes and this is a philosophy of science debate where Popper is often referred to:

"This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified."

The steps science takes builds on these (fundamentally unprovable) building blocks (we simply have no choice but to 'believe' in order just to let science begin).

Again, yes - it was Thomas Kuhn who wrote about this - his theory was that truth becomes accepted once it "fits" the present paradigm, then it has effectively "earned" its place and is considered to be true.

So for example the IPCC about climate change - all of the scientific research in their reports will have been presented before a panel of scientists who will meticulously analyse the data / methods etc before it is "accepted" or rejected. The same will happen if any scientist wants to get their research published in a journal. Their research will need to go before a panel who will again check it all before it is decided whether it will be accepted or rejected. Of course only a small proportion of research gets moved into these circles - most research never finds its way into a journal, as a scientist, I've never bothered sending my research to a journal, so even though my methods might have been accurate / my calculations accurate - if I sent my research to the IPCC panel, it might probably be rejected because it hasn't been published in a journal first - that's how scientific research "moves up" and gets accepted. All of these are safe guards if you like and I do think it's important that scientific research / testing gets scrutinised, however.....

The problems occur when an erroneous theory is accepted into the present paradigm, meaning that once it's in there - all newer theories will then be compared to it. If the new theory contrasts against the erroneous one, it risks being rejected even though it might be true. A famous and pertinent example being Einstein's theory of relativity - Quantum scientists are already struggling with it and now of course the Higgs Boson experiment could cause friction;

In the CERN experiment, physicists fired a beam of neutrinos toward a detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, 454 miles away. Using highly sophisticated equipment, the CERN physicists tracked some 15,000 neutrinos over a period of three years. The neutrinos seemed to be reaching the detector 60 nanoseconds (a nanosecond is one-billionth of a second) faster than light. That may be a minute discrepancy, but it should not occur if Einstein’s theory of relativity is correct.

The CERN team has scrutinized its results and hasn’t been able to find any obvious errors. Physicists everywhere are scratching their heads. Could it be that another scientific revolution is at hand? Are we witnessing a paradigm shift?

[Antcliff]

No. If it were "essentially" or "fundamentally"...do you mean only??..based on groundless agreement on this or that we would have a happy option: select some other set of undischarged assumptions saying that, for example, cancer does not exist.

We don't. Ergo..a tad more is going on.

But I fear I step on the path of being professor-eddington-explainsy, so back to the poetry stacks.

Ant

[Raincoat]

Groundless? Eh? I've just spent ages trying to explain all the safe guards so that scientific research is properly checked....???

and shoving that "professor" in there without actually saying anything isn't appreciated.

[Ros]

Surely the point is that an erroneous theory will eventually be shown as such, due to the nature of scientific repeatability etc.

I've never quite seen the point of this need to equate poetry with science and say they are the same thing. I can't see it at all. I know who I'd rather have designing any aeroplane I'm thinking of flying in, though. We may not be able to provide a formal logical proof for all of it, but most of science is pretty darned solid.

Ros

[Mic]

Scientists can't prove anything: and they don't claim to (unless they are nutty professors). They have come up with some pretty convincing theories though.

Mic

[Mic]

I've never quite seen the point of this need to equate poetry with science and say they are the same thing.

I feel it is less that they are the 'same thing' (though everything is of course the same, really - though that perhaps isn't very helpful in the context of this discussion) and more, perhaps that they are both trying to do the same thing: reveal (irrefutable?) truth. In my view, poetry is more successful in this endeavour than science.

Mic

[Mic]

I think science has a lot to offer poetry; I'm less convinced about the other way round.

Ros

As somewhere to go a' hunting for subject matter and metaphor, are you thinking? Or in other ways?

[Antcliff]

Foul ref! Shin kick rather than responding to point! If (as is seemingly being said) science is only based on a fit/not with some claims agreed upon with nae-reason-at all-at-all, then wouldn't we have the option to just pick a much happier set?
Ant

[Antcliff]

What? Another shin kick? I didn't "shove" anything in. I was trying to avoid going on and laughed at myself..(using an expression I had used when talking about a poem of Ros). It was being said (by you seemingly...note: "essentially yes") that science is based on no more than simple agreement over some premises. To which I pointed out that if this were so, some consequences would follow. But the consequence is not credible. So the claim is false. So I did "say something"..very clearly. Sigh..was trying to help.
Ant.

Groundless? Eh? I've just spent ages trying to explain all the safe guards so that scientific research is properly checked....???

and shoving that "professor" in there without actually saying anything isn't appreciated.

[Mic]

If it were "essentially" or "fundamentally"...do you mean only??.

I mean 'at the heart of it', the 'essence' of it.

groundless agreement

I didn't say 'groundless'. I simply meant that we can't 'prove' this. The fact that we can't prove it doesn't mean it isn't true.

cancer does not exist.

I've yet to see any scientific proof that we even exist. But, as already mentioned, scientists don't prove things (they know this is a fool's errand) they come up with as good a theory as they can.

I'm afraid I can't address much of what you said as I don't quite follow your argument.

Yours,

Professor Ridgway

*Sweeps dramatically out of lecture hall in swishy black gown'

[Antcliff]

I don't understand the tone here. That is a foul.
Yes you can follow the argument. You explicitly said that science is fundamentally based on an agreement to accept. It may be that you did not want to say "only"...which is why I raised question. But if you did I am suggesting that the view of not quite credible because it would have the consequence that we could (hey/ho) just agree to accept some far happier set.
Ant

If it were "essentially" or "fundamentally"...do you mean only??.

I mean 'at the heart of it', the 'essence' of it.

groundless agreement

I didn't say 'groundless'. I simply meant that we can't 'prove' this. The fact that we can't prove it doesn't mean it isn't true.

cancer does not exist.

I've yet to see any scientific proof that we even exist. But, as already mentioned, scientists don't prove things (they know this is a fool's errand) they come up with as good a theory as they can.

I'm afraid I can't address much of what you said as I don't quite follow your argument.

Yours,

Professor Ridgway

*Sweeps dramatically out of lecture hall in swishy black gown'