The Poetry in Science

What’s closest to Science than Poetry?  “All other things”, you may say.  I’ll tell you may be wrong, my friend! 

As the Canadian poet Christian Bok said, there’s a long relation between science and poetry since Newton.  Alexander Pope would write “God said let there be Newton and All was Light,” celebrating with his generation the beauty of the new physics changing the view of the world.

The British poet Ruth Padel says eloquently in her article for The Guardian, the science of poetry, the poetry of science: “Scientia means "knowledge:" science, it seems to me, is not about facts; it is about thinking about facts.”  As she also clarifies, poetry and science, both, share the need of an abstract insight to be worked though precision in order to explain the details of a particular idea or point of view.

Poetry was first written to express such questions as why are we here, and what is the world that surrounds us made of?  All the modern science derivates from philosophy and the base was exactly the same – this inherent characteristic of mankind that is the curiosity that brings us beyond where our feet touch.  Metaphors are commonly used as a tool to scientific discovery and to lyric.  Einstein himself would say that imagination is more important than knowledge, and I have to agree that it is the main reason for why we are still here, lingering through the average expectation of the extinction rate of our species and, even better, evolving.

A good scientist and a good poet have one more trace in common that, perhaps, is the most important: both of them know that they might be proved wrong, that their suppositions are only the best explanation for what they are living at the moment.  This self knowledge allows them to question answers and correct mistakes, and that is what takes mankind further than we could only imagine. 

Antonio Ereditato, on his Cern presentation of how they have measured neutrinos traveling above the speed of light – an experiment that could tumble down the pillars of modern science, – said carefully as every scientist should do: “When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this '.  Despite the large significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects."

Everything starts with a question, so the joy is in the journey of the search for truth – we probably will always get very close to it, but never there; and that’s exactly the beauty of it.