Poetry and science
I enjoyed this honest piece in Saturday’s Guardian from Nick Laid, a poet struggling to write about modern astrophysics.
Can complexity of this kind be versified? Poetry evokes better than it explains. There is also, for the poet, the danger of simply being seduced by new terminology, the taste of exotic words. The poem becomes a list. And there is the lack of shared reference. Mention a telephone or tree, a marriage or goose-bumps, and we have some similar notion of what is meant. Our experiences of science are either abstract or mediated. How far can we imagine what a cell is like? Or a radio wave? Outer space comes to us only through telescopes and satellites.
And with space, the measurements cannot be apprehended. How do you describe things of this size or length of time, this speed or heat? Experience, being broadly empirical, gives us no meaningful terms.
The latter problem is one I understand – the true answer to the sometimes half-awed question of ‘how you get your head round such large numbers’ (the age of the Universe, the size of the Galaxy) is that you don’t, you just learn to use them. But the rest of this poet’s lament? I’m not so sure. Is it really easier to describe what a marriage between two people means than it is to talk about the red blood cells that flow through their hearts as they beat together?
I don’t mean to belittle the hardship of the poet’s task; there’s a reason I write in prose and fairly workaday prose at that when I try to describe the Universe. But Feynman, as so often, had it right:
It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
