At the Arts ⁄ Science Interface
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- ARTSCIENCE: first look-ahead to 2010
- 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
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The PEST Anthology
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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!
………..and, for readers of New Scientist ……
On Reading A. C . Grayling’s ‘Mindfields’
Late as it is, I welcome this testimony
To the exquisite complexities of my brain;
These billions of neurons engaging trillions of synapses
In seamless continuity, superfast, no fuss.
The wonder of it is how the micro-physicality
Of this multitude of happenings in my head,
All with space, time, physiological characteristics,
Induce this further miracle of my thoughts.
Thoughts, I should remind you - even mine –
Have neither weight, colour, nor other tangible properties.
Old ‘mind/body’ dichotomies are dead.
So the question is - how do these manifold activities,
Even of such a brain, also invoke
The richly coloured magic of my ‘consciousness’;
Raise, from such chaos of hidden dreams,
Such sure, external witness to this unique ‘me’?
Stuffed as it is with all this prodigality of brain,
I’m glad his answer lies outside my head.
For what I ‘know’ as in the concept of this tree,
Needs inner - brains in touch with outer -worlds.
Such necessary concessions to the externalities
Detract nothing from his high- rating of my design.
___________________________ RW
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 small stitch, some skein of life unravels.
We are the needle’s necessary eye
Through which the time-thread, past to future, travels.
Ours is the gene that cannot be ignored,
That bends the warp of Fate’s incessant spinning;
Refreshes meaning in the lapsing word;
Explodes the fraud of ending and beginning.
Of earth’s rough harmonies we’ve shared the making,
That song ceaselessly sung; whose every singer,
At future dawns and long-tomorrows’ wakings,
Hymns to new fruits the promised pollen-bringer.
Nothing’s to come in which we lack all sharing.
Some echo ineradicably lingers.
Each life’s particularity of daring
Informs this pattern 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