Skip to main content

A Sonnet to Science - Sam Illingworth ***

In this book, Sam Illingworth is on a mission - to 'present an aspirational account of how the two disciplines [of science and poetry] can work together.' He does this by presenting shortish biographies of six scientists (one of whom isn't) who wrote poetry, showing how the two aspects of their life were intertwined. I confess my immediate reaction to this was a Spock-style raised eyebrow: I'm not a great fan of poetry, and it seemed suspiciously like the kind of arty-sciency crossover that wouldn't help either side of the C. P. Snowian divide. However, I was genuinely prepared to be persuaded otherwise, and entered into the six biographies (Davy, Lovelace, Maxwell, Ross, Holub and Elson) with an open mind. I don't know if it's intentional, but the mix of relatively well-known and distinctly obscure names was part of the attraction.

Humphry Davy is a familiar enough individual, but his biographical details tend to come in as a side dish to the greater Michael Faraday, so it was good to see more on his background (though he doesn't come across as a very likeable character). I found his poetry stodgy (not entirely surprising given the writing style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century).

Next comes Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She is a fascinating character, but to call an amateur mathematician who wrote a single document on Babbage's work a scientist stretches the term to breaking point. As Illingworth acknowledges, Lovelace's contribution is disputed. He clearly comes down on the side that makes her work 'the first computer program and Lovelace the first computer programmer', despite significant concern among some historians of science about this. There is no doubt that Lovelace's commentary on a paper by Menabrea on Babbage's Analytical Engine contains interesting work, though. Oddly, and perhaps reflecting a relatively small output in poetry as well, this section has more poetry by her father than by Lovelace herself.

Next we get onto the only truly great scientist covered here, James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell was a towering genius of a physicist, and his life and work is well summarised in the pocket biography. Maxwell also wrote far more approachable poetry than either of the two earlier names - partly because of changing fashion, but also because his verse was often comic. This doesn't come across strongly enough in Illingworth's assessment, as he is trying to give the poetry a serious role in the scientist's life - so, for example, he doesn't mention the delightful The Song of the Atlantic Telegraph Company that Maxwell wrote for his friend Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who at the time was having problems with the transatlantic cable, a poem that makes use of the shorthand 2(U) 'to avoid vain repetitions', representing the phrase 'Under the sea' twice in a row.

The remaining three biographies are less of notable scientists who wrote poetry than notable poets who worked in medicine and astronomy. Admittedly Ronald Ross won one of the earliest Nobel Prizes in medicine for his work on the cause and transmission of malaria, but he's hardly a household name - and comes across as an extremely unpleasant individual. In the case of Miroslav Holub it's certainly his poetry and his life through the various sufferings of his country that make the story (interestingly, in his online biography he's listed as a poet who happened to do immunology). Finally there's Rebecca Elson who studied galaxy formation and globular clusters. She died sadly just 39 - there's more a balance of work and poetry here, though as Illingworth notes, there is very limited information on her life and work.

All in all, I can't say the experience converted me to the joys of poetry, or made me think that poetry has anything useful to offer to the communication of science. If you have an interest in both science and poetry, though, this is definitely a book for you - as it will be if you're only interested in poetry and feel it has a role in making scientists more cultured.
Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more