Dedicated to foundational theoretical physics, the Perimeter Institute (PI) has an active outreach programme. In their latest ‘newsletter’ (received via email on September 19, 2018) highlights poetry written by scientists, (from the ’12 poignant poems’ webpage),
It can be said that science and poetry share the common purpose of revealing profound truths about the universe and our place in it.
Physicist Paul Dirac, a known curmudgeon, would have dismissed that idea as hogwash.
“The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way,” Dirac grouched to a colleague. “The two are incompatible.”
The colleague to whom Dirac was grumbling, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a lover of poetry who dabbled in it himself — as did, it turns out, quite a few great physicists, past and present. Physicists have often turned to poetry to express ideas for which there are no equations.
Here’s a look at some of the loveliest stanzas from physicists past and present, plus a few selections of rhyming silliness that get an A+ for effort.
Considering his reported distaste for poetry, it seems Dirac may have committed a few lines to verse. A four-line poem credited to Dirac laments the belief that, once past the age of 30, physicists have already passed their peak intellectual years.
Perhaps the most prolific of all the poetic physicists was the Scottish genius [James Clerk Maxwell] whose equations for electromagnetism have been called “the second great unification in physics” (second to Isaac Newton’s marriage of physics and astronomy).
Maxwell’s best-known poetic composition is “Rigid Body Sings,” a ditty he used to sing while playing guitar, which is based on the classic Robbie Burns poem “Comin’ Through the Rye” (the inspiration for the title of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye). In terms of melding poetry and physics, however, Maxwell’s geekiest composition might be “A Problem in Dynamics,” which shows both his brilliance and sense of humour.
If Maxwell’s “A Problem in Dynamics,” is a little too technical for your mathematical comfort level, his fellow Scottish physicist William J.M. Rankine penned poetry requiring only a rudimentary understanding of algebra (and a peculiar understanding of love).
Richard Feynman was known for both his brilliance and his eclectic lifestyle, which included playing the bongos, safe-cracking, and, occasionally, writing poetry.
Although theoretical physics is her specialty, Shohini Ghose is a true polymath. Born in India, educated in the US, and now a multi-award-winning professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ghose has delivered popular talks on subjects ranging from climate change to sexism in science. She recently joined Perimeter Institute as an affiliate researcher and an Equity, Inclusion & Diversity Specialist. On top of all that, she is a poet too.
English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester was a prolific scholar whose collected works on matrix theory, number theory, and combinatorics fill four (large) volumes. In his honour, the Royal Society of London bestows the Sylvester Medal every two years to an early-career mathematician who shows potential to make major breakthroughs, just as the medal’s namesake did. It is only fitting that Sylvester’s best known work of poetry is an ode to a missing part of an algebraic formula.
Sonali Mohapatra is a Chancellor’s PhD Student at the University of Sussex and an alumna of the Perimeter Scholars International master’s program (during which she sang on the nationally broadcast CBC Radio program Ideas). She’s also the author of the poetry compilation Leaking Ink and runs an international magazine on creative resistance called Carved Voices. In her spare time — which, remarkably, she occasionally has — she delivers motivational talks on physics, feminism, and the juxtaposition of the personal and the professional.
William Rowan Hamilton was an extraordinary mathematician whose research had long-lasting implications for modern physics. As a poet, he was a bit of a hack, at least in the eyes of his friend and renowned poet William Wordsworth. Hamilton often sent his poems to Wordsworth for feedback, and Wordsworth went to great pains to provide constructive criticism without hurting his friend’s feelings. Upon reading one of Hamilton’s poems, Wordsworth replied: “I do venture to submit to your consideration, whether the poetical parts of your nature would not find a field more favourable to their exercise in the regions of prose.” Translation: don’t quit your day job, Bill. Here’s one of Hamilton’s better works — a tribute to another giant of mathematics and physics, Joseph Fourier.
For some lyrical physicists, poetry is not always a hobby separate from scientific research. For some (at least one), poetry is a way to present scientific findings. In 1984, Australian physicist J.W.V. Storey published a research paper — The Detection of Shocked Co/ Emission from G333.6-0.2 — as a 38-stanza poem. To any present-day researchers reading this: we dare you to try it.
Caltech physicist John Preskill is one of the world’s leading researchers exploring quantum information and the application of quantum computing to big questions about spacetime. Those are extremely complex topics, but Preskill also has a knack for explaining complicated subjects in accessible (and, occasionally, rhyming) terms. Here’s a snippet from a poem he wrote called “Quantum Cryptography.”
Nitica Sakharwade is a PhD student who, when not tackling foundational puzzles in quantum mechanics and quantum information, writes poetry and performs spoken word. In fact, she’s performing at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in October 2018. Though her poems don’t always relate to physics, when they do, they examine profound ideas like the Chandrasekhar limit (the mass threshold that determines whether a white dwarf star will explode in a cataclysmic supernova).
David Morin is a physics professor at Harvard who has become somewhat legendary for sprucing up his lessons with physics-based limericks. Some are quite catchy and impressively whittle a complex subject down to a set of simple rhyming verses, like the one below about Emmy Noether’s landmark theorem.
Other poems by Morin — such as this one, explaining how a medium other than a vacuum would affect a classic experiment — border on the absurd.
Lastly, we can’t resist sharing a poem by the brilliant Katharine Burr Blodgett, a physicist and chemist who, among other achievements, invented non-reflective “invisible” glass. That glass became very useful in filmmaking and was first put to use by Hollywood in a little movie called Gone With the Wind. After she retired from a long and successful career at General Electric (where she also pioneered materials to de-ice airplane wings, among many other innovations), she amused herself by writing quirky poetry.
I’d usually edit a bit in an effort to drive readers over to the Perimeter website but I just can’t bear to cut this up. Thank you to Colin Hunter for compiling the poems and the write ups. For anyone who wants to investigate the Perimeter Institute further and doesn’t have a PhD in physics, there’s the Slices of PI webpage featuring “fun, monthly dispatches about science designed for social sharing.”
“Science-v-Poetry” or Big Bang” according to the 19th century poet :
Was Poe the first to propose a revolutionary new vision of our universe?
Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki [1809-1849] wrote (between 1843/4-1846 – i.e.a few years before Poe’s ‘Eureka’) a mystical prose poem entitled ”Genesis from the Spirit” . If we omit the mystical parts in the poem, we ended up with the following description of the creation of the world:
“…The Spirit… turned one point… of invisible space into a flash of Magnetic-Attractive Forces. And these turned into electric and lightning bolds – And they warmed up in the Spirit… You, Lord, forced him… to flash with destructive fire… You turned the Spirit… into a ball of fire and hung him on the abysses… And here… a circle spirits… he grabbed one handful of globes and swirled them around like a fiery rainbow… “
(see: « big-bang-according-to-the-19th-century-polish-poet-j-slowacki » at salon24.pl for more details and references)
Best regards,
P.S.
well-known Italian astronomer A.Cappi, author of a paper on Poe’s ‘Eureka’ about ”Genesis from the Spirit” : « It’s a fascinating case of cosmology in literature »
Hello E. Mali! Thanks so much for reading the post and leaving a comment. I apologize for my ignorance but it took me a while to track down all those intriguing references you’ve got in your comment. I found this in Juliusz Słowacki’s Wikipedia entry, “… a Polish Romantic poet. He is considered one of the “Three Bards” of Polish literature — a major figure in the Polish Romantic period, and the father of modern Polish drama,” as well as this, “In the 1840s he developed his own philosophy, or mystical system, with works such as Król-Duch and Genesis z Ducha [in English, Genesis from the Spirit, 1844] being an exposition of his philosophical ideas (“genesic philosophy [pl]”) according to which the material world is an expression of an ever-improving spirit capable of progression (transmigration) into constantly newer forms.[14][17] As Ławski notes, his philosophical works can transcend clear boundaries of simple literary genres.[18][25].”
As for Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka, there’s this from its Wikipedia entry, “Though Eureka is generally considered a literary work, some of Poe’s ideas anticipate 20th-century scientific discoveries and theories.[3] Analysis of Eureka’s scientific content shows congruities with modern cosmology, stemming from Poe’s assumption of an evolving Universe.”
A. Cappi (Alberto Cappi) is mentioned in Eliza Strickland’s September 10, 2014 essay (Edgar Allan Poe, Part-Time Cosmologist/Big-Bang Philosopher) for Nautilus, “Scientists who have read Eureka in the decades since have justly called attention to errors in other parts of Poe’s cosmology, and many consider his Big Bang notion to be nothing more than a lucky guess. But a few give Poe credit for a creative leap that contemporaneous astronomers were unable to make. Alberto Cappi is an Italian astronomer who studies galactic clusters and the structure of the universe, and who has taken an interest in Eureka. “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe, because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility,” Cappi wrote in an email. “No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-static universe.” [Strickland’s essay can be found here, https://nautil.us/edgar-allan-poe-part_time-cosmologistbig_bang-philosopher-235081/%5D.
Or you can go to Alberto Cappi’s paper (The Cosmology of Edgar Allan Poe) for the 2009 Role of Astronomy in Society and Culture Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 260, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1743921311002468
Again, thank you. I had a glorious time learning and discovering more about poetry and science.
Cheers,
Maryse
It gave me great pleasure that you were willing to look for all this information…
(see also:
https://www.salon24.pl/u/edalward/1334289,big-bang-according-to-the-19th-century-polish-poet-j-slowacki )
Thank you! Greetings,
E.M. Paris/France
Hello E.M.! Thank you for the link. The part where the text relating to the Big Bang is excerpted was a highlight. I’m glad they had the original text after the translation. Sadly, I don’t have any Polish language skills but I think there is something important about seeing the text in its original language. Again, thank you. Cheers, Maryse
You know, there are even two good translations of Słowacki’s poem into French on the Internet, but I haven’t found an English translation that suits me. So I had no choice but to translate the parts I needed myself… And in such a situation (as I am neither a professional translator nor a poet or writer), it is always better to quote the text in its original language to avoid any further criticism.
Cheers
P.S.
It is a flower named after the Polish poet:
https://wiki.irises.org/TbFthruJ/TbJuliuszSlowacki
You know, there are two good translations of Słowacki’s poem into French on the Internet, but I haven’t found an English translation that suits me. So I had no choice but to translate some parts of the poem myself. And in such a situation, it is always better to quote the text in its original language to avoid any further criticism…
Cheers
P.S.
It is a flower named after the Polish poet:
https://wiki.irises.org/TbFthruJ/TbJuliuszSlowacki
Hello E.M.! First, thank you for the link to the flower named after ‘Juliusz Slowacki … one of my favourites … when I was a child, we had irises at the end of our yard and the Spring always seemed a bit more magical when the irises bloomed and perfumed the air … I have always had a particular fondness for the larger ones with a deep purple colour … serendipity! … and thank you for that translation … I’m not sure my French is up to it but I will try to rack down a French version … we are getting close to Easter and, so, Joyeuses Pâques. Cheers, Maryse
Hello again! It’s been an odd week … I got two identical messages from someone else too … ah well, better I get the messages than never see them at all. Cheers, Maryse
Thank you Maryse, Happy Easter / Joyeuses Pâques to you, Cheers
P.S.
Poet’s grave (in Paris):
https://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/2016/09/cimetiere-de-montmartre-continued-24.html
Hello E.! I was thinking Père Lachaise, of course, Montmartre. Thank you, Maryse
Hello,
J.Słowacki’s mystical prose poem « Genesis from the Spirit » (from which my quote comes – see my earlier post here) has recently been translated into English (it is a synthesis of computer translations made by Grok, chatGPT etc) : http://www.madryt.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4701
I’d like someone with literary experience to read this translation (9 pages) and evaluate its quality.
So I offer anyone who writes even a short evaluation/rating/review that I’ll be his/her/their free personal guide during your next stay in Paris! (Let’ make a deal!!!).
To publish your evaluation :
Go to http://www.madryt.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4701
Scroll down ;
Click on « odpowiedz » ;
Enter your username into the line labeled «Nazwa użytkownika: »
(this is optional, so you can leave this field blank) ;
Tape your comment / evaluation in the box ;
Insert the following characters
!@yTCxA
into the line labeled « Pytanie » ;
To send your comment, click on « Wyślij » ;
Or you can simply send me your email to dodat0@proton.me
That’s all. Thank you !
Best Regards,
Ed
Hello! It’s been a while since you’ve visited here last. I hope you get responses from interested parties. Good luck! Cheers, Maryse