Wonder in Science and Poetry
Pattiann Rogers
There are several basic qualities that all fine scientists and poets have in common. Almost all of these qualities I would describe as being childlike, though they make adult creative work possible. The best poets and scientists have an energetic curiosity that resembles the delight and curiosity a toddler has in first experiencing of the world. Scientists and poets and toddlers wonder, in the complete sense of that word. They are amazed and curious about what others might term the commonplace or simple things of the world. Scientists and poets set about to respond to their curiosity and wonder in the manner of their own unique disciplines.
Because scientists and poets are curious, they ask questions. Early in his work, Einstein asked himself, “What would the world look like if I were riding on the beam of light coming from that clock tower?” That’s a child’s question, but an immensely intriguing one that led to Einstein’s theory of relativity. An entomologist asks: How does a bumblebee manage to lift its heavy weight and fly? Poet Pablo Neruda asks whimsically: How many bees are there in a day? The work of both scientist and poet begins with curiosity and a question.
The very best scientists and poets revere and love the world, the “nature” of things, the minutiae of the grandeur of the earth and the universe, and they express their reverence and love by observing carefully, by paying very, very close attention to what they see, feel, taste, hear, and sense in all ways. Thoreau wrote in his journal: “For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.”
And like children, poets and scientists possess a flexibility of thought, a willingness to modify their approach or stance toward a subject or object if experience proves it necessary. Like children, they have an openness to surprise, to what experience of the physical world may be telling them that they didn’t expect. The poets are not dictatorial, but allow the music of the language to lead their poems without completely knowing where. If the music, and thus the meaning, falters, the poets begin over again. The scientists constantly check their work against nature, like sewing a garment and holding it up to nature to see if it fits. The garment may need to be taken apart and redesigned. Nature makes the judgment, and the scientists are willing to adjust their work as necessary.
Neither poet nor scientist adheres rigidly to dogma. They are fearless in this way. Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of 20th century physics, began his lectures by saying to his students, “Every sentence I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question.” Poets and scientists lack the dogmatic arrogance that hinders discovery. Exploration is the work of both, the daring to write something that has never been written before, the daring to imagine and investigate a new connection between two unlike things—the moon and gravity, for instance, or the metaphor “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Productive and perceptive poets and scientists are humble in the face of universe. Newton described himself this way: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Both scientists and poets allow the intuition of their bodies to seek the pleasure of beauty and elegance in their work. Science and poetry are not solely intellectual endeavors. The wild imagination, the leap of creativity, plays a large role in both processes. Poets and scientists feel their way toward what seems a fitting and beautifully simple response to the questions they ask themselves and the universe. They may go in the wrong direction, end in a morass, but the good scientist and poet will recognize the error, retrace the path, and begin to imagine another way.
Stephen Jay Gould in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory writes: “Something almost unspeakably holy—I don’t know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.”
Both the scientist and the poet witness to the wonder of life and the universe.
I’ve described here how I believe our best scientists and our best poets engage their work. Of course, there are dull people who may call themselves scientists and poets but who don’t match my description and whose work reflects their dullness. And brilliant scientists and poets may make mistakes, become dishonest, become overly enamored with themselves and their accomplishments. But then, they will be no longer brilliant, and neither will be their work.
Pattiann Rogers has published numerous books of poetry including Eating Bread and Honey, Geocentric and Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems. She has been the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have won the Tietjens Prize, the Hokin Prize for Poetry, three book awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and four Pushcart Prizes among other awards. She lives with her husband, a geophysicist, in Colorado.