Science and Poetic Beauty:
weaving the r ainbow
Helen Heath, IIML, VUW.
@Helen__Heath
[email protected]
1
Night’s Magic
When Isaac closes his eyes
he is hanging, arms outstretched
only faith keeps him
from falling – a magic trick.
In his left hand is the Book of Revelations
in the right, the Book of Nature,
written in geometry.
He opens his eyes to take note
of God’s will in action. Observations
must be interpreted –
bodies in motion, fruit from the tree.
Reclusive, he experiments upon himself,
slides a bodkin into his eye socket
between eyeball and bone
until he sees severall white darke
& coloured circles.
Sibyls and Daemons
are still close enough
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for him to hear their voices.
The sun rises so slowly it’s too hard
to pick the moment of first light
or the last of the night’s magic.i
Today I'll talk about how science has aided our understanding of how literature works and the value of
literature to science communication. I'll discuss the emergence of modern science poems parallel to
science communication; explain why narrative and metaphor are vital to any communication; and
touch briefly on difficulties in blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. I'll also share a few
poems along the wayii.
Firstly though let me tell you where I'm coming from. The poem of mine I just read (as I'm sure
you've figured out) was about Sir Isaac Newton. One of the things that drew me to Newton's story, as
a poet, was the way he straddled two worlds – the world of science and the world of magical alchemy,
similarly I think poetry and science can co-exist in harmony even though they have been seen as being
in conflict at times in the past.
Frequently today's scientists are seen as undermining the magical way someone like a child or poet
may see the world – in awe. However in my experience nothing could be further from the truth. I must
confess here that I am both a poet and the daughter of two (not especially mad) scientists. I have a
foot in both worlds and often feel compelled to argue the merits of both to their opponents. As a child,
when my father showed me a butterfly, we didn’t just see its pretty colours and delicate flight. He
showed me the beauty in the working of its rolled proboscis, we looked closer at the tiny overlapping
wing scales, he told me how there are often ultraviolet patterns in the wings that we cannot see, but
which may be seen by other butterflies, I listened to the beauty of Latin names. When I was older we
discussed the ‘butterfly effect’ and chaos theory. Knowledge (or the quest for it) doesn’t detract from
the awe you can experience; it only adds. This is the experience of science I had in my childhood –
the curious scientist seeking knowledge in an awe-inspiring world, and this is the value of science to
my literature.
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Richard Feynman talks about this experience in the documentary about him: 'No Ordinary Genius' by
Christopher Sykes. As does Richard Dawkins is his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbowiii. Dawkins
discusses the relationship between science and the arts from the perspective of a scientist and argues
that science and art are not at odds. His starting point is poet John Keats' well-known accusation that
Isaac Newton destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by 'reducing it to the prismatic colours.' iv (Of
course, we know Newton did no such thing: it was Theodoric of Freiberg who discovered rainbows
were prismatic. Newton's famous discovery with prisms was recombination of a spectrum back into
white light.) There are arguments that Keats' medical background indicates this accusation may be
merely tongue in cheek.
Popular science writing and poetry fall into the two sides of a ‘two cultures’ model, as representatives
of the sciences and the literary arts. The phrase ‘two cultures’ comes from C.P. Snow’s famous 1959
Rede lecture, in which he argued that there was a growing cultural divide with “[l]iterary intellectuals
at one pole – at the other scientists [...] Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension”. v
Although “many commentators now see his argument as outdated and redundant” or “reductive and
simplistic”, his model of culture has been extremely influential and still colours discussion of the two
cultures in both the media and academia.vi This perceived gulf has not always existed.
The Romantic age was one of symbiosis rather than opposition, in which scientists such as Sir
Humphry Davy were also poets and poets such as Coleridge had a shaping influence on scientists – in
fact it was Coleridge who invented the early 19th-century term 'scientist' as an alternative to the older
phrase 'natural philosopher'.vii
Dawkins, as you'll know, is only one of many science communicators to emerge towards the end of
the twentieth century. Although scientists have written about science dating back to Herodotus,
Lucretius, Copernicus and Galilei; popular science writing as we know it began in the middle period
of the nineteenth century. However the biggest science writing boom seems to take place during and
after the so called ‘Science Wars’ of the 1980s and 90s, which took place between scientific realists
and postmodern critics over the nature of scientific theory. The postmodernists questioned scientific
objectivity and critiqued the scientific method and scientific knowledge. Scientific realists countered
that objective scientific knowledge is real and accused Postmodern critics of having little
understanding of the science they were critiquing. My research indicates this publishing boom may
have been a direct response to the postmodern critique. viii
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The tradition of science poetry goes back as far as the beginnings of science writing, as John HeathStubbs and Phillips Salman say in the introduction to their 1984 anthology Poems of Science “in all
periods... poets have employed an intellectual framework derived from the science of their day”; and
“in practice poets are considerably more concerned with science and its opportunities for their poetry
than has been recognised”.ix
My research also indicates an increase in the writing of science poems, in the UK especially, parallel
to the development of science communication as a field, fed, in part, by an increase in funding for
poets' residencies in places like the science museum in London and funding for science poetry
anthologies. It seems science communicators were quick to see the potential of poetry.
Let me read you another poem of mine that won the ScienceTeller poetry award in 2011. It's inspired
by Bill Bryson’s description of the Big Bang in his book A Short History of Nearly Everythingx, in
which he describes the creation of the universe happening in the time it takes to make a sandwich.
Making tea in the universe
Have a look in the pantry.
you’ll need to gather up everything
there is, every particle
of matter between you and me and the
edge of creation. Now squeeze it
into a dot so infinitesimally
compact that it has no
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dimensions.
There is no apron to stand behind.
There is no space, no darkness
for this pregnant dot to wait in.
There is no past for it
to emerge from, no egg timer.
The tea leaves are in the pot,
put the kettle on, light the gas.
In the first second
the dot has space.
Magnets fall from the fridge
as you get the milk out.
In the first minute your universe
is a million billion miles across
and growing fast.
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There are 10 billion degrees of heat.
The kettle is boiling by the third
minute and 98 per cent
of all the matter that is
or ever will be has been
created. Pour the tea to brew
while you wait
for life on earth.
What I hope this poem illustrates is the ability of poetry to condense information and the importance
of metaphor to aid communication, obviously not the full complexity, but a foot in the door to
engaging readers. Science, more explicitly neurology and psychology, can help us understand why
narrative and metaphor are so important to the way we understand the world and, conversely,
narrative and metaphor can help us communicate the message of science more effectively.
We all enjoy a good story, whether it's in a poem, a novel, a movie, or simply something a friend is
telling us. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative? Researchers have
known for a while that the “classical” language regions, where we decode words into meaning, like
Broca's area and Wernicke's area are involved in how the brain reads. If we listen to a powerpoint
presentation with boring bullet points, only these parts of the brain get activated, nothing more. xi
What scientists have come to realise recently is that when we are being told a story, things change
dramatically. Narratives activate many parts of the brain, not only the language processing parts get
activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story
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are too. If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's
about motion, our motor cortex gets active. Metaphors have exactly the same effect. xii It gets better.
I'm going to quote from a Psychology Today article:
“A team of scientists at Princeton led by Uri Hasson had a woman tell a story while on an MRI
scanner...they recorded her story on a computer and monitored her brain activity as she spoke. They
then had a group of volunteers listen to the stories while they had their brains scanned... when she had
activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up,
so did theirs. By simply telling a story the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the
listeners' brains... Hasson also looked at listening comprehension. He found that the more the listeners
understood the story, the more their brain activity dovetailed with the speaker's. When you listen to
stories and understand them, you experience the exact same brain pattern as the person telling the
story.”xiii
So, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That's why
metaphors work so well. While we search for a similar experience in our brains, we activate the
insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, disgust, etc. In fact research
indicates that frequent readers of fiction develop higher levels of empathy than non or infrequent
readers.xiv
The following piece I'm going to read is an extract from my long poem sequence called 'Postcards',
which has just been selected by poet laureate Ian Wedde as one of the best New Zealand poems for
2012. In this sequence my intent was to communicate awe and beauty within a scientific framework
while keeping room for 'poetic truths' and imagination. The basis of this poem was a combination of
my own travel journal from a trip to Greece and my father's journal from the same journey taken
several years earlier.
Postcards
The prayer
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May I hold a part of all living things within me
and the wind take me to them piecemeal.
May I believe in the direction of my journey
and my children take their own paths.
May everything that ever was be here, now
with the constant flux and ebb.
May I reach the edge, with nothing lost
or found in the cosmos –
but a burst of heat escaping
like a pilot light, back to the ether.
The landing
The truth about stones is some fit in your palm,
some you lay your palms upon.
If you press a stone with your finger
your finger is also pressed by the stone.
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If you pull a stone on a rope
the stone pulls you back.
If you carry a stone in your pocket
you can smooth it with your thumb.
I collect pebbles from Ithaca
and intend to bring them home.
Up the hill
The truth about raindrops is
they are not shaped like tears.
As raindrops fall they become balls,
burger buns, parachutes, then doughnuts.
Rain is only sad in wet places,
others greet it with euphoria.
Water is containment and travel,
it worries at earth and stone.
Things do smell better after rain, like
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wild oregano up the hill from Vathy.
Lonely Planet
Roosters and trucks
at six a.m.
Italian tourists
on scooters, yelling.
Cicadas’ harsh metallic
chirps, like frightened frogs.
Locusts and grasshoppers
rattling in the scrub.
The angry buzz of Vespula,
black wasps trapped
in my empty soft drink can.
Then cicadas again,
relentless tambourines
in my head.
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Breathing
Blue-green algae breathing out
is the truth about life on earth.
Iron oxidises, rust flaking lets us
peel away layers of a ship’s bolt.
Air, a clear, light sky-blue
caused by absorption of red.
Sitting on the balcony,
the fish shop below not
letting me forget it –
the smell rising.
Vibrations
The truth about bones is
we hang on them.
Vibrations transmit,
transmute through bone.
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The hammer hits the anvil
the anvil hits the stirrup.
What we measure depends
on the sensitivity of our instruments.
The thin crust rose and fell, stone
walls in the village won’t rise again.
Although I am a poet rather than a science communicator, I believe creative writers have a
responsibility to get the facts right. However, at the same time it is our role to invent and create. We
walk a difficult line between the Truth with a capital 'T' and 'poetic truth'. When we write we create a
contract of trust between our readers and ourselves. They want to know fact from fiction and the only
way I can see around these difficulties is to be up front with the way we define our writing rather than
alienating our readers.
This is difficult because the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have blurred. More people
nowadays seem to read fiction to learn, anecdotally there is an increase in popularity of historical
fiction for example. However, at a conference for creative non-fiction writers xv I recently attended,
speakers argued for the place of invention in creative non-fiction. Not to change recorded facts but to
be able to fill in gaps and compress people into composite characters to improve the narrative
structure. This is a potential minefield that every writer will need to negotiate their own way through.
I learned this lesson the hard way with my own book. I strove to ensure the scientific facts were
correct but the personal story was a mash up of my own story, other peoples stories and fiction to
create the final narrative. I managed to hurt a couple of people along the way.
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My time is almost up so I'd like to end with a love poem, which I hope shows that you can sneak
scientific concepts and metaphors coupled with imagination into any writing. A kind of Trojan science
communication!
Holding water
Beds get tighter when you share
them. You’ll slip into his curvature,
pooling in the dip of his collar bone.
When you dance with your partner
you’ll stay in motion till someone cuts in.
If something isn’t there you can’t know
if you’ve proved its absence.
You dream yourself into a beach,
become the grains of sand
he rushes in to meet
and the waves break – slap
on the pebbles – slate, amber, bone.
Thank you.
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i
‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians . . .’ – John Maynard Keynes
ii
Heath, Helen. Graft. Wellington, N.Z: Victoria University Press, 2012.
iii
Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2000.
iv
Benjamin Haydon (1929). "Chapter XVII 1816-1817". In Alexander P. D. Penrose. The Autobiography and Memoirs
of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786-1846 Compiled from his "Autobiography and Journals" and "Correspondence and
Table-Talk". Minton Balch & Company, New York. p. 635. "During an 'immortal dinner' 28th December 1817 hosted by
Haydon and attended by Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Keats, and Keats' friend Monkhouse, Keats lightheartedly said
Newton 'has destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours.' He then proposed a toast to
'Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics' to the amusement of all."
v
Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 4.
vi
Leane, Elizabeth. Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies. Ashgate, 2007, p. 1
vii
Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.
viii
Heath, Helen. Unpublished thesis in progress, 'Poems of science & technology: hybrids of knowledge, language and
form.'
ix
Heath-Stubbs, John, and Phillips Salman. Poems of Science. Penguin Books, 1984.
x
Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything.
xi
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?
_r=2&pagewanted=print retrieved 28/03/2013
xii
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/?pagewanted=print retrieved
28/03/2013
xiii
Psychology Today, Joshua Gowin http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201106/why-sharingstories-brings-people-together : quoting ' Stephens, Greg J., Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson. “Speaker–listener Neural
Coupling Underlies Successful Communication.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (July 26, 2010).
doi:10.1073/pnas.1008662107.
xiv
xv
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/07/reading-fiction-empathy-study retrieved 28/03/2013.
http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse/RMIT%20Events/Major%20events/NonfictioNow%20%20Conference%202012/
retrieved 28/03/2013