Recently I found and enjoyed the article "Scientists Take On Poetry," an article by Katherine Wright in Physics -- a free, online magazine from the American Physical Society. After the following lead-in:
Stuck with how to present your latest scientific project? Try a poem.
Wright's article tells of numerous scientists who have been poets and offers visual poetry by Stephany Mazon and Manjula Silva. The article quotes Sam Illingworth, a poet and geoscientist at the University of Australia, "Poetry is a great tool for interrogating and questioning the world." Illingworth heads the Editorial Team of an online journal, Consilience -- a newish journal that describes itself as "the online poetry journal exploring the spaces where the sciences and the arts meet." The current issue has the theme "uncertainty" and offers 19 poems; one of these is "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle" by Alicia Sometimes -- and it begins with these words:
The reality we can put into words is never reality itself
we cannot measure
the position (x) and the momentum (p)
of a particle with absolute precision
. . .
This link leads to the rest of Sometimes' poem and to others offered in Consilience.
Posts
