At the Arts ⁄ Science Interface
- BOUBA-KIKI MEETS THE HOBBIT
- ‘ EAVESDROPPING ON SCIENCE’: TURNER ACCUSED.
- SCIENCES CIVIL WARS: SEND IN THE PHILOSOPHERS
- WELCOME SERENDIPITY
- GOOGLE’S CHAIRMAN ARGUES CVN’s CASE
- WHICH WAY TO HAPPINESS ?
- EYES and EARS OF THE BEHOLDER
- CELEBRITIES of SCIENCE
- LANGUAGE, TRUTH and LOGIC
- ENGINEERS’ CORNER
- CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the TRIPLE KIND.
- OUT of AFRICA … THE STORY of YOU…
- ARTS/SCIENCE ‘ENCOUNTERS’: a Review
- ARTSCIENCE: ON THE 2010 AGENDA
- Upon a Peak in Darien… New Vistas from Old Places
- CP Snow: Only Connect
- Whose Rise and Fall …?
- How Many Cultures? CP Snow and the Darwin Legacy
- Creative Break-Through at Sheffield University
- Darwin - Right or Wrong?
The Ideas Exchange
What You've Been Saying
The Ideas Exchange
What Others Have Said
The PEST Anthology
- YET MORE PEST POEMS
- More ‘PEST’ Poems
- PEST Inaugural
- A Work in Progress: Poetry of Science and Technology
The CVN Archive
About This Blog
The PEST Anthology
August 13th, 2009
YET MORE PEST POEMS
From ‘The Temple of Nature’
Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These,as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
Erasmus Darwin (1732-1802)
(Grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin’s ‘The Temple of Nature’
“ anticipated the outline of his grandson’s theory by half a century” (Ashton Nichols, ‘Romantic Natural Histories’)
_____________________
From ‘Darwin A Life in Poems’…..
“More Funny Ideas About Grandeur “….
…’Out of famine, death and struggle for existence,
comes the most exalted end
we’re capable of conceiving: creation
of the higher animals!
Our first impulse is to disbelieve-
how could any secondary law
produce organic beings, infinitely numerous,
characterised by most exquisite
workmanship and adaptation?
Easier to say, a Creator designed each.
But there is a simple grandeur in this view –
that life, with its power to grow, to reach, feel,
reproduce, diverge, was breathed
into matter in a few forms first
and maybe only one. To say that while this planet
has gone cycling on
according to fixed laws of gravity,
from so simple an origin, through selection
of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms
most beautiful and wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.’
Ruth Padel
‘ Ruth Padel’s remarkable memoir of her great-great-grandfather is a sequence of exquisite, precise and moving poems. Once I had started reading I could not put it down until I had reached the end’ Claire Tomalin.( Nor I – Ed)
________________
Bumblebees and the Scientific Method
A scientist, a man of parts,
(some of which worked, in fits and starts),
by using certain apparatus
proved bees could not be aviators.
There was no doubt, declared our hero,
the fundamental laws of aero-
nautics, - dynamics and whatever
must soon convince the unbeliever
that bees were built to such a model,
they scarcely could do more than waddle.
The ratio of their body weight
to wing-span, he could demonstrate,
precluded take-off, much less flight.
Colleagues allowed his sums were right:
Professors, Fellows, Doctors, Tutors,
sweating away at their computers,
confirmed our man’s results in toto,
and grudgingly agreed to go to
honour his triumph at a party,
(nobody really loves a smarty).
While all acclaimed his theories,
nobody thought to tell the bees,
who, never having been to college,
nor stayed abreast of modern knowledge,
kept up a stunning imitation
of wing-powered aerial navigation
Sheena Pugh
_________________
From Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Close your eyes to make
it large, larger, largest. Someone can see it
and put it on film, so like a picture, so like an echo
attracting and repelling across what you can only
imagine as noise in a vast cathedral dome, knocking
for a door, logged in your head, wordless……
(In hospital for a scan, Jon Glover became fascinated by the ways in which Magnetic Resonance Imaging creates pictures of the hidden processes of the nervous system. It could express what is already written within the human body, in all organic life and the earth itself. Whether in the hospital scanner or the vast particle accelerators exploring the fabric of the universe in laboratories deep underground in Geneva, the process of making atoms collide to reveal new meanings tells a story, written in the brain, on the walls of a cave, in a poem..)
Cern: frontiers, gravediggers
Like the infinitely splitting particles, circling
to destruction between Switzerland and France.
Why bother with them? It seems I’m digging
them out for the sake of it. Sick. Really sick.
It’s as if particles from wartime corpses
might have seeped home in the soil from Verdun,
to either side, pining for an explanation,
or a chance to rest, or to forget what
they once were by becoming quite invisible.
Does anything verbal stack up the voltage
for such bright light? It could be a holding
charge, static, while waiting to see if the
rotting matter can be read out loud
in the form of a script to make a plea,
or warm an electric coil to switch off
the guilt, since you’re not immune from that now.
Press. Pass it on. It works as long as you
can’t see it. Close your eyes and listen
to the document in your head. There now.
Buy. It trickles through in no time at all.
Jon Glover
____________________
Leonardo and the Vortex
Poems 1988-98 Jo Shapcott
I get like him sometimes:
seeing the same shape in everything
I look at, the same tones
in everything I hear.
But I’ll never make a deluge drawing
or be gripped by the science of circular
motion. And I probably won’t learn to care how
many complex collisions happen in a pool
when water is trickled from above.
How many currents percuss against each other,
and how waves rebound into the air, falling
again to splash up more water in smaller
and smaller versions of the same.
How a storm is different where air and water mix,
bursting again and again through the thin skin
which separates them. How a woman’s hair
moves in spouts and spirals just like water
and how the leaves of the star plant
trail on the ground in a loose coil.
And look at your sleeve, folding and swirling
around your arm, and the pattern of fine black hairs
curving from inner wrist to outer elbow,
and the underlying muscles relying on that slight
twist around the lower arm for their strength,
and the blood coiling around your body
through the little eddies in the larger veins
and arteries, coiling towards the vortex
in the chambers of your heart where I sit,
where the impetus has pulled me in.
Jo Shapcott
_____________________
what if a much of a which of a wind
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it’s they shall cry hello to the spring
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn’t:blow death to was)
-all nothing’s only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live
ee cummings
___________________
Engineers’ Corner
We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints –
That’s why so many poets end up rich.
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?
Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It’s always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day.
Yes, life is hard if you choose engineering –
You’re sure to need another job as well;
You’ll have to plan your projects in the evenings
Instead of going out, it must be hell.
While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,
You’ll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust.
With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,
With no hope, even, of a modest bust.
No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There’s far too much encouragement for poets –
That’s why this country’s going down the drain.
Wendy Cope
( Occasioned by an Engineering Council Advertisement.’Why isn’t
there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we’ve
always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint’)
__________________
“Arcturus” is his other name
“Arcturus” is his other name—
I’d rather call him “Star.”
It’s very mean of Science
To go and interfere!
I pull a flower from the woods—
A monster with a glass
Computes the stamens in a breath—
And has her in a “class”!
Whereas I took the Butterfly
Aforetime in my hat—
He sits erect in “Cabinets”—
The Clover bells forgot.
What once was “Heaven”
Is “Zenith” now—
Where I proposed to go
When Time’s brief masquerade was done
Is mapped and charted too.
What if the poles should frisk about
And stand upon their heads!
I hope I’m ready for “the worst”—
Whatever prank betides!
Perhaps the “Kingdom of Heaven’s” changed—
I hope the “Children” there
Won’t be ‘new fashioned’ when I come
And laugh at me—and stare—
I hope the Father in the skies
Will lift his little girl—
Old fashioned—naught—everything—
Over the stile of “Pearl.”
Emily Dickinson
1830-1886
___________________
February 24th, 2009
More ‘PEST’ Poems
I am an Engineer
I take the vision which comes from dreams
and apply the magic of science and mathematics,
adding the heritage of my profession
and my knowledge of nature’s materials
to create a design.
And when we have completed our task
all can see
that the dreams and plans have materialised
for the comfort and welfare of all.
I organise the efforts and skills of my fellow workers
employing the capital of the thrifty
and the products of many industries,
and together we work toward our goal
undaunted by hazards and obstacles.
I am an Engineer.I serve mankind by making dreams come true,
Anon. (This plaintive little poem, supplied by Professor Peter Radziszewski of McGill University, was reputedly found pinned to a site hut during the construction of the Konkan railway. I am grateful to Peter, too, for his translation of Solange LeBel’s very positive piece below.)
Jongleur d’humanité
Réinventer les formes
Rendre évanescentes les masses
Actualiser l’avenir
Pressentir l’ombre du futur.
Funambule des lignes
Trapéziste des angles
Jongleur d’humanité
Solange LeBel,
Étudiante en génie,
Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
Reinvent forms
Make substances evanescent
Actualize tomorrow
Predict the shadow of the future
Graphic tight rope walker
Trigonometric trapeze artist
Juggler of humanity
Sonnet-To-Science Edgar Allan Poe
Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
(From ‘The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe’ 1946)
Molecular Evolution
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL
At quite uncertain times and places,
The atoms left their heavenly path,
And by fortuitous embraces,
Engendered all that being hath.
And though they seem to cling together,
And form “associations” here,
Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,
And through the depths of space career.
So we who sat, oppressed with science,
As British asses, wise and grave,
Are now transformed to wild Red Lions,
As round our prey we ramp and rave.
Thus, by a swift metamorphosis,
Wisdom turns wit, and science joke,
Nonsense is incense to our noses,
For when Red Lions speak, they smoke.
Hail, Nonsense! dry nurse of Red Lions,
From thee the wise their wisdom learn,
From thee they cull those truths of science,
Which into thee again they turn.
What combinations of ideas,
Nonsense alone can wisely form!
What sage has half the power that she has,
To take the towers of Truth by storm?
Yield, then, ye rules of rigid reason!
Dissolve, thou too, too solid sense!
Melt into nonsense for a season,
Then in some nobler form condense.
Soon, all too soon, the chilly morning,
This flow of soul will crystallize,
Then those who Nonsense now are scorning,
May learn, too late, where wisdom lies.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was a Scottish physicist,mainstream to the understanding of electromagnetic waves.
THE GOSSAMER Philip Appleman
Sixty miles from land the gentle trades
that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay
sift a million gossamers, like tides
of fluff above the menace of the sea.
These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing
and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean;
the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging,
small aeronauts on some elusive mission.
The Megatherium, done to extinction
by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint
to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson:
for survival, it’s the little things that count.
No.4 from ‘ Darwin’s Bestiary’ by Philip Appleman (from ‘New and Selected Poems 1956-96’. University of Arkansas Press).
October 26th, 2008
PEST Inaugural
Wrought from Thought
In the beginning…thoughts. Ideas. Shapes.
Slowly, at first, they drift, then swifter, swift
Like fleeting stars, white arrows through the rift
Flying, soaring, sparks through the gap that gapes
Glaring, open, in the mind, black as night.
And now begins the work: melting, melding,
Smelting, smithing, forging, fusing, welding
Those flowing thoughts flashing white hot, now bright,
Now clinking, cooling, clear, gentle red;
Crystallised phrases, clusters, strata, lines
Of verse emerge out from the mental mines
To crisp, clean, crackling paper, to be read -
Bold, black letters standing proud: a sonnet.
Black, but warm, from all the work upon it.
Thomas Durant
With this sonnet, Thomas won the Poetry Prize at Norwich School. A Sixth Former, it says much for his school that he is studying Chemistry, Physics, Further Maths -and Latin ! With a local Engineering Industry Education Scheme in support. It’s Congratulations all round!
___________________________
Lucretius: On The Nature of Things
This terror, then, of the animus, this darkness of mind must be
dispelled, not by the sun’s light or its rays’ shafts
but by careful observation and understanding of inner
laws of how nature works. To start with, the first rule
is that nothing can come from nothing, not even by will of the gods.
Mortal men are afraid as they look about them and see
the many things that happen on earth and up in the sky,
and they cannot tell why or how and therefore think that gods
must bring them about through fiat. But if our axiom holds
and nothing can come of nothing, then we are obliged to look further
to learn what we want to know – how each thing was created
and how, without the gods, all things have come to be.
Book I lines 129 sqq
There are those who disagree, who of course know nothing at all
of matter and still believe that without the power of gods
nature cannot attend to its business, changing the seasons,
producing crops, and the rest of what goes on in the world -
so, for them, it is only divine pleasure that leads men
and women to Venus for whom they perform the rite that begets
the generations in order that the race may not die out.
They imagine the gods looking down, arranging all this for us,
but their flights of imagination leave all reason behind.
I may or may not be right in my theory of first beginnings,
but I have no doubt whatever that I can show how heaven
has nothing at all to do with the way nature is made
and how it behaves……
Book II lines 148 sqq
Titus Lucretius Carus (c.100 BCE)
‘On The Nature of Things’
(De Natura Rerum: trans Daniel R Slavitt:
University of California Press)
——————–
The Isolation of Two Milliard Light Years
The human race, on its little ball,
Sleeps, wakes, and works,
Wishing at times for companionship with Mars.
The Martians, on their little ball –
What they do, I don’t know,
Maybe they sloop, wike and wook .
But at times they wish for companionship with Earth –
That’s certain.
Universal gravitation
Is the pulling together of the force of isolation.
The universe expands
And so we all unite our wants.
The universe distends
And so we are all uneasy.
The isolation of two milliard light years
Prompts an involuntary sneeze.
Tanikawa Shuntaro (b. 1931)
The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse
( Faber and Faber: trans. Geoffrey Bownas
and Anthony Thwaite)
________________________________________
WH Auden: from After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics
If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so’s,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains…………..
…………..
This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact that one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not……..
WH Auden
( Collected Poems, Faber and Faber 1962)
_________________________
This Excellent Machine
This excellent machine is neatly planned,
A child, a half-wit would not feel perplexed:
No chance to err, you simply press the button –
At once each cog in motion moves the next,
The whole revolves, and anything that lives
Is quickly sucked towards the running band,
Where, shot between the automatic knives,
It’s guaranteed to finish dead as mutton.
This excellent machine will illustrate
The Modern World divided into nations:
So neatly planned that if you merely tap it
The armaments will start their devastations,
And though we’re for it, though we’re all convinced
Some fool will press the button soon or late,
We stand and stare, expecting to be minced, -
And very few are asking, Why not scrap it ?
John Lehman ( 1907 - )
Humming Bird
I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow,vast,succulent stems.
I believe there were no flowers then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.
Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.
D H Lawrence
Selected poems 2008 (Fenton)
Penguin
Quoted in Richard Dawkins ‘Unweaving The Rainbow’
“DHL’s poem is almost wholly inaccurate and therefore, superficially, unscientific.
Yet, in spite of this, it is a passable shot at how a poet might take inspiration from geological time.
He lacked only a couple of tutorials in evolution and taxonomy to bring his poem within the pale of accuracy, and it would be no less arresting and thought-provoking as a poem….. A larger obstacle would have been Lawrence’s hostility to what he wrongly thought of as the anti-poetic spirit of science and scientists …….”
“Knowledge has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas with spots……”. DHL.
The Enduring Gene
(‘Darwin always stressed the continuity of life, how all things are descended from a common ancestor,
how we are in this sense all related to each other ….And yet, because of that great engine of natural selection – variation – every species is unique and every individual is unique, too.’ Oliver Sacks . NYRB )
We come of earth, of ocean and of sky.
Drop this one stitch, some skein of time unravels.
We are the needle’s necessary eye
Through which the life-thread, past to future, travels.
Ours is the gene that cannot be ignored,
That bends the warp of Fate’s incessant spinnings;
Refreshes meaning in the tired word;
Explodes the fraud of endings and beginnings.
Of music still to come we’ve shared the making,
Earth’s restless anthem in which all are singers:
At every dawn and new-tomorrows’ waking,
We are to newer fruits the pollen-bringers.
Nothing’s to come in which we lack all sharing.
Some echo ineradicably lingers.
Each life’s particularity of daring
Informs these patterns at our childrens’ fingers.
RW.
From ‘ THE BURIAL AT THEBES ’ : SEAMUS HEANEY.
I was privileged to attend the Premiere ( Oxford Playhouse 19/10/08) of the Opera ( music Dominique Le Gendre ) set to Seamus Heaney’s libretto ‘The Burial at Thebes’. The latter is a re-working of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ ( circa 441 BC ! ) for the contemporary theatre stage. These 20 lines evoke the arts, science and ultmate limitations of humankind like no others!
Minister of The Admiralty
Among the many wonders of the world
Where is the equal of this creature, man?
First he was shivering on the shore in skins,
Or paddling a dug-out, terrified of drowning.
Then he took up oars, put tackle on a mast
And steered himself by the stars through gales.
Minister of Culture
Once upon a time from the womb of the earth
The gods were born and he bowed down
To worship them. He worked the land,
Stubbed the forests and harnessed stallions.
His furrows cropped, he feasted his eyes
On hay and herds as far as the horizon.
Cabinet
The wind is no more swift or mysterious
Than his mind and words; he has mastered thinking,
Roofed his house against hail and rain
And worked out laws for living together.
Minister of War
Home-maker, thought-taker, measure of all things,
He can heal with herbs and read the heavens.
Nothing seems beyond him, except death.
Death he can defy but not defeat.
Seamus Heaney
‘The Burial at Thebes’
Faber and Faber 2004
October 22nd, 2008
A Work in Progress: Poetry of Science and Technology
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night.
God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.
Alexander Pope (1730)
Three intial ‘Cantos’ are proposed for the eventual sorting of suggestions and
submissions to the anthology:
Canto One : How It Started
a selection of excerpts from suggested ‘historic’ pieces by well-and lesser known writers (e.g. Erasmus Darwin, Lucretius, Pope, Shelley,
Heraclitus etc) broadly, but not slavishly, up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Canto Two : The 20th/21st Centuries
An updated selection from suggested contemporary and ‘recent’ pieces by professional poets (e.g. Wendy Cope’s ‘Engineers’ Corner’, John Agard’s ‘Millennium Bug’, Marianne Moore ‘Four Quartz Crystal Clocks’ etc).
Canto Three : New Writing
‘New’ writing by people working in the professional Science/Engineering/Arts and related communities, worldwide.
The online anthology is now open for suggestions and submissions; by email to ralph@ralphwindle.com ; though the ‘canto’ structure will not be imposed during the early collation of pieces through to end 2010. Meanwhile there will be frequent postings of suggested work.
_____________________________________
It did not last: the Devil howling ‘Ho!’
Let Einstein be!’ restored the status quo.
J.C. Squire (1926)