To celebrate National Science Week, PoeticA takes a look at the relationship between poetry and science

The purpose of this program is to expose the unsatisfactory nature of two clichéd images; firstly the image of the scientist as a dry rationalist endlessly going through lists of factual data, and secondly the image of the poet as an undisciplined emotional firefly, relying on imagination and the musicality of words and never checking the facts.

In reality, both the scientist and the poet use imagination and observation as starting points, but from then on the way they employ language differs widely. Poets may seek multiple resonances of words and embrace rather than reject ambiguity in language, while scientists tend to look for maximum clarity or singularity of meaning in their writing.

However, this does not mean that there is no crossover between the two disciplines. Poet and scientist very often borrow images and metaphors from each other. Poets, like scientists, are curious about the make up of the world and have the same desire to get behind surface appearances to the meaning of things.

As we'll hear from poets including Hugh MacDiarmid, Tom Petsinis, Mark O'Connor, Lavinia Greenlaw, Peter Goldsworthy and Jan Owen, there are many poems dealing with scientific subjects that employ specialised scientific language, and even mathematical formulae within their lines. Coming from the other direction, there are those who have made their living as scientists, such as Roald Hoffmann and Miroslav Holub who convert their specialised knowledge into subjects for their poetry.

back to top

Scientific theories may start with careful (or chance) observations, or a wild act of imagination (or a dream of a double helix!) but then follows patient checking of the theory against measured observations and a process (as described by Karl Popper) of fitting into the body of the rest of scientific knowledge.

Poetry may begin in the same ways; imagination, dreams, or detailed observation and factual research. The writing of the poem may be also be a highly disciplined act, but in the end the poet's concern is words that offer truths, not the generation of further facts. By this I mean truths in a broader, philosophical sense, offering insight to human experience, not necessarily predicting specific outcomes. For example, Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" (which says destruction is caused by human desire and hate) has been true and continues to be true, but cannot predict where that destruction will next occur.

Poems can be used to predict the future only in a general sense, they cannot calculate exact orbits, or measure the mass of a distant star. Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, plays with the idea of predictability in his poem "The Scientific Method":

Good theories
are those capable
of being disproved, Karl
Popper says. Like
that if I come
next week,
at the same time, sit
over my coffee
just exactly
where I looked up
and observed
you,
looking at me,
that I will find you,
again,
there,
and this time
have the courage
to smile.

back to top

In "The Same and Not the Same", a personal view of chemistry, Hoffmann shows that the world observed at its molecular level is complex and agitated, as are the emotions of the human beings who observe it. Hoffman argues that chemistry is actually a science that must engage with ethics, that decisions at the molecular level have ramifications for our whole ecology. In his poem on the German scientist Fritz Haber, Hoffmann says:

… Haber knew how catalysts
work, that a catalyst is not innocent…

and later in the same poem:

…a cheap pound of Haber's

primped iron could make a million pounds
of ammonia. Geheimrat Haber of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute thought himself a catalyst
for ending the war; his chemical weapons

would bring victory in the trenches…

Hoffmann's poems are published in a book called "Memories" (Calhoun Press, Columbia College, Chicago 1999)

Science and poetry share a sense of discovery; exploring new knowledge and new ways of using language. The two disciplines also tend towards revealing connectedness and wholeness. The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid said:

…I seek a poetry of facts. Even as
The profound kinship of all living substance
Is made clear by the chemical route.

Poetry and Science. 1943.

Hugh MacDiarmid is the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve who was born in1892 in Langholm, Dumfriesshire. MacDiarmid was a journalist and polymath, a political radical who wrote Hyms to Lenin as well as diatribes on Scottish Nationalism. He wrote lyrics in Scottish, poems of social conscience, as well as complex scientific meditations. Consider the opening of his long poem "On a Raised Beach":

All is lithogenesis - or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truite, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilieva of the the world,
Diectic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad
What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?

back to top

In this poem, MacDiarmid draws on specialist terms from astronomy, geology, anatomy and biology but works them into a highly musical, alliterative description of an ancient Scottish littoral. The impression we get is not of a poet dredging through the thesaurus but of a man who knew his science. Later in the poem he develops moral and philosophical viewpoints from examining the stones of the raised beach:

We must be humble. We are so easily baffled by appearances
And do not realise that these stones are one with the stars.
It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low,
Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace or pigsty.
There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.

And…

I must get into this stone world now.
Ratchel, striae, relationships of tesserae,
Innumerable shades of grey,
Innumerable shapes,
And beneath them all a stupendous unity…

And again…

What happens to us
Is irrelevant to the world's geology
But what happens to the world's geology
Is not irrelevant to us.
We must reconcile ourselves to the stones,
Not the stones to us.

back to top

MacDiarmid died in 1978, and is now acknowledged as one of the most important Scottish poets of the twentieth century. His Complete Poems is published in the Penguin Modern Classics series.

The program contains an interview I recorded in 1993 with Miroslav Holub, the late Czech poet and immunologist. Holub was born in 1923 in Pilzen. He studied science and medicine at Charles University in Prague and worked in the department of philosophy and the history of science. In 1954 he joined the immunological Institute of the Czech Academy of Science.

Although he was later accorded privileges to travel, he became a "non-person" for the decade of the seventies under the Stalinist regime in his home country. Holub published over 140 scientific papers as well as 16 books of poetry and several collections of essays. He died in 1998.

Holub was a genuine case of a scientific poet, drawing on the perceptions he encountered in his laboratory work to write minimalist but intensely philosophical poetry. The sites for his poetry are the dissecting lab, the test tube, and the microscope.

In The Microscope

Here too are dreaming landscapes,
lunar, derelict.
Here too are the masses
tillers of the soil.
And cells, fighters
who lay down their lives
for a song.

Here too are cemeteries,
fame and snow.
And I hear murmuring,
the revolt of immense estates.

I have called him a "scientific poet" but I wonder whether Holub would have agreed to being called a "poetic scientist." While science directly influenced his writing of poetry both in subject matter and philosophy, the similarities between his poetry and his scientific papers were only stylistic. That is, he liked brevity, compression of language, and a surprise, a new idea, in both. In an essay on "Poetry and Science", (published in "The Dimension of the Present Moment", Faber and Faber,1990) he warned of the dangers of letting poetic ideas guide scientific investigation. This is not to say that he thought one mode of thinking or expression superior to the other.

back to top

He made humorous comments on the dangers of simplistic formulation and testing of scientific theories in his poem, "Brief Reflection on Cats Growing in Trees." In the poem, moles have sent explorers to discover the upper world. One has observed a bird in a tree, another a cat. This has lead to conflicting mole theories that birds (or cats) grow on trees.

The two contradicting theories made it impossible
for one neurotic
member of the committee to fall asleep. He
climbed up to see
for himself. But it was night again, and pitch
dark at that.

Nobody's right, announced the worthy mole.
birds and cats are
optical illusions, which are evoked by the double
refraction
of light. Actually, he said, up there nothing is
different
from down here, only the earth is thinner and
the roots on
the other side are whispering something, really
quietly.

They approved this theory.

Since then, moles have stayed underground without
establishing
any committees, and they don't believe in cats,

or believe just a little.

Of course, the poem is also about how we know what to observe. It is about what we rule in as our study area, and what we leave out. The position of the observer is a vital question for Holub. As he says in his "Brief Reflection on the Test Tube" we constantly divide ourselves from the world in order to observe it, forgetting that we ourselves are in the test tube.

In another poem "Zito the Magician", Holub addresses the beautifully austere, magnificently closed world of Mathematics. Zito is a court magician, performing the most astounding miracles, capable of conjuring anything up, that is until one day he is asked to produce "sine alpha greater than one". His face falls, he says it can't be done, and retires dejectedly from court. Holub's point is, it doesn't matter what happens in the observable world, sine will always be between plus and minus one.

back to top

Mathematics as a non-empirical system is perhaps more an art than a science, but it is an essential tool of science, and has also been a rich source for poetry. Tom Petsinis is a poet, playwright and novelist who teaches Mathematics at Victoria University of Technology. His collection of poems "Naming the Number" (Penguin 1998) includes poems on the square root of minus one, the history of zero, and "a triangle's mid point crisis." He observes mathematical principles in nature and human affairs as well as writing about numbers as though they were people. This is his description of an irrational number, that is, a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction:

Eternal critic of the senses
I am incommensurable as soul.

Geometers denied me at first,
Quick to persecute a heretic
Who'd undermine their temple
Constructed on a marble cube.

For Petsinis, mathematics and geometry hold a mystic, religious significance. Take for example the concept of a point, that entity in space that has zero dimension:

The Point

Thirteen, a world away from primary school,
I struggled with the notion of a point;
An entity without body or breadth
That fled sharp pencils tested on my tongue,
And proved more elusive than an electron
Whose cloud covered blackboards with unknowing.

Shadows patched the fading weeks of that summer.
The pinoak's leaves fell for the hundredth time.
The dark seed had been sown. Shuffling the park,
I questioned, doubted, picked the last scab
From my knee as if it were a crumb of happiness.

Faith was growing, raising hopes by degrees:
That Holy Ghost of geometry prefigured the soul,
Defined the shortest line between God and me.

back to top

Another Australian poet who incorporates mathematics and science into her poetry is Jan Owen. Her poems address such varied subjects as Tektites, S.E.T.I and Orthosmittia. She is one of the few poets I know who incorporates mathematical formulae into lines of poetry.

In Orthosmittia reyei, for example she includes the mathematical statement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and other mathematical formulations are to be found in the poem "Hidden Variables". Many poets and other writers have been intrigued by the Uncertainty Principle. There is something inherently poetic about a theory that says that in the process of discovering certain facts (either the position or velocity of a particle) your very investigation changes one or other of those facts and therefore you cannot know them both at once.

In her poem "Rheomode" Jan Owen mentions the Implicate Order Theory of the quantum physicist David Bohm:

Late afternoon, we lean on the sill
over a city of birds.
The implicate order folds and unfolds
an origami of doves and leaves.

Bohm's theoretical physics espoused the idea that beyond the observable world there lies a deeper, implicate order that is undivided and whole. In describing this he used the metaphor of a stream, where the surface waves and ripples are "abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow" (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.)

back to top

This is a very poetic concept, as are other notions from theoretical physics and astrophysics, such as black holes and alternative universes.
There are further examples in this PoeticA program of poets and scientists crossing into each other's territory; Peter Goldsworthy's jokey poems on chemistry and numbers, Lavinia Greenlaw on parallax, Tahiti, and the big bang, and Mark O'Connor's minutely detailed observations of the Great Barrier Reef, its biology and evolution.

It is clear that Poetry and Science are not such comfortably separate realms, inhabited by utterly different creatures who cannot appreciate each other's modes of thought. In fact, there is plenty of science in poetry, and poetry in science.

My thanks go to Graham Holland and Alex McBratney for their valuable assistance in preparing this program.

Mike Ladd   

[ back to PoeticA homepage ]

back to top