Physics and Poetry

One of the running themes of this blog, most likely, will be considering the relationship between art and science, and the idea that these two areas often have difficulty finding common ground. Some artists think that by analyzing and dissecting nature, scientists remove the beauty and mystery that surround it. For example, from Walt Whitman,

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

And scientists, in turn, contend that poets and artists are ignoring entirely a different kind of beauty that can be found within nature. For example, Richard Feynamn says

"...far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

I, unsurprisingly, side with Feynman. There's a certain type of beauty that comes with understanding. That said, it's possible sometimes to get caught up in the formality of it all, and forget to just 'look up in perfect silence'.

Where do I aim to get with these considerations? Oh, nowhere in particular really. I just think it's interesting.