It’s true. This is what happens at a liberal arts college: worlds collide! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! And poets and scientists talking to one another!
This is precisely what the Christian fundamentalists are warning us of with the Blood Moon Prophecy, which is happening this weekend, and culminates with poetry in a coffeehouse on Tuesday. If ever you wanted to witness an apocalypse, get yourself to Morris stat.
Lovely, there is too much unfounded snobishness from the scientists about humanities.
Ah-Hah! Morris is Teh Centre!! Of Teh Plot!!! And Das Conspiracy!!!! Thar’s evens a poopyhead!!!!! Watt moar proofs es Neeedededed!!!!!!
It’s going to be a Super Blood Moon! I am all excited, ready with camera, telescope, and many oooooohhhhs and aaahhhhs.
I love the idea of a science poetry slam. The meeting sounds like great fun, I wish I lived closer.
Ah, sounds like Rhyme and Reason. Enjoy yourself.
Well, Dawkins says science is the poetry of reality.
Me, I see no reason why the sciences and liberal arts can’t join forces to make the world a less shitty place.
“A poet and a scientist walk into a bar…”
Poetry; check. Science; check. Alcohol…..
Sounds like false advertising to me.
re @1:
YESSSSS!!!
I’ve been settin up me telescope today in preparation for the apocalyptic light show.
argh. Not a “blood” moon, just a Celestial RedTomato, on it’s way to splat the GOP clown show.
–poet: rhymes out, “ouch pouch”
–scientist: Measures its height, says “set too low, or not; if intended to ‘bar the Bar’. Ergo, redundancy obstruction”, *sigh*.
*rim shot*
thank you thank you, be sure to tip your server ;-)
It sounds like an interesting talk. I wish I could be there.
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty .
how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
–e. e. cummings
Rigid Body Sings
Gin a body meet a body
Flyin’ through the air.
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
Ilka impact has its measure,
Ne’er a ane hae I,
Yet a’ the lads they measure me,
Or, at least, they try.
Gin a body meet a body
Altogether free,
How they travel afterwards
We do not always see.
Ilka problem has its method
By analytics high;
For me, I ken na ane o’ them,
But what the waur am I?
James Clerk Maxwell
(‘ilka’=’each’, ‘waur’=’worse’)
Oh, and ‘gin’=’if’
Origins of Vegetable and Animal Life, Book V, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) – Lucretius, approx. 50 BCE.
damn
During national poetry week my biology teacher always set writing a science poem to be our homework. He pinned the best ones to the war outside the classroom. Most of the poems there were by a mysterious individual called “Eva Lution”. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that that was my teacher’s pen name.
When all these prophesies fail too, I wonder if they will finally realize that their holy book is wrong in every way?
wcorvi:
No.
Is this where Robert Frost and Niels Bohr will discuss the universe not taken?
#18, Bob Foster
Ohh, that’s good! I like it! Thank you.
“Something good
For goodness sake
Whoa-o-o-o”
Science and poetry? Wouldn’t that be Erasmus Darwin?
And then there is Quest University Canada where there are no departments, where professor offices are assigned randomly (so the physicist may have a poet on one side of him/her and a biologist or political scientist on the other), and some classes will be run by professors from two completely different areas of study.
Take a listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZQe73IXZtU
Perhaps it’s because I went to Harvey Mudd (where you are required to minor in the Humanities or Arts) or maybe it’s because I have my BS in Applied Math and my MFA in Musical Theater, but I just don’t see this as shocking at all. In fact, if I ever had the time and money to go back to school, I’d be interested in getting a PhD in Sociology to study the intersection of the arts and the sciences. My working hypothesis is that it’s easier to go from the sciences to the arts than the other way around. I base this on (at this point anecdotal experience) that it’s much more likely to see a scientist dabbling in the arts than the other way around. Feinman played the bongos. Lehrer was a pianist and singer. But you don’t really find too many artists doing chemistry experiments and the like. While I think a lot of this has to do with “start up costs” (if you want to learn to play the guitar, all you really need is a guitar and the time to practice while if you want to do chemistry, you need actual equipment and some specialized training), I think it also has to do with the ability to go from “theory” (more scientific) to “practice” (more artistic) being easier than the other way around. And then there’s the sociological cachet of art over science.
And then there’s Lem. From The Cyberiad, a poem on Love and Tensor Algebra:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
Then there was the article in the mathematics journal I read where they were discussing a topography proof that there are only 18 patterns of wallpaper…done as a comic strip. And, of course, the most wonderful tutorial on differential calculus: Prof E McSquared’s Original, Fantastic, & Highly Edifying Calculus Primer (now in the Expanded Intergalactic edition) which is done as a graphic novel.