The Poetry of Science

Paul of Tarsus’s epistle to the Philippians contains the following arresting passage:

‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

It is a travesty how this brilliantly phrased tract in the King James Bible is mutated into some insipid shadow of itself in the so called new age Bibles. Throw them away dear reader!

Two things that struck me when coming across the passage are firstly the wonderfully non-religious, non-didactic and reflective way of contemplating morals and secondly the nuanced order with which the virtues are listed; first and foremost of these virtues being truth.

Truth, in the essential sense, is founded on facts or veritable actualities in reality and doesn’t and shouldn’t be hijacked and used in such ineffable and nebulous ways to mean just any personal convictions. Therefore the value of truth is precisely in that it has been tested, verified and confirmed and that it has endured the gauntlet of critical cynicism and challenges to its veracity – the basis of which is the engine that drives the discipline of science.

Lord Byron, the testosterone-fuelled poet used to snide the Romantic poets, whom he termed ‘Lakers’, for their soppy sentimentality. One of the most famous ‘Lakers’ and one of the great English poets, Keats, wrote in his Lamia:

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade

This beautifully phrased accusation had being aimed at Newton, who, by experimenting with optics and light, splitting the sunlight into its spectrum components, was seen by Keats as undoing the poetry and wonder of rainbows. Indeed, the notion that science is somehow dry, sterile, arid and emotionless is a view still evident. However, quite the opposite is the case – science, what has been termed natural philosophy until only the 18^th century, by investigating and unearthing what is true, unveils to us the world in all her complexity, wonder, majesty and beauty.
Take rainbows – everyone now knows that they are the result of reflection and refraction of sunlight by the atmospheric water droplets. But did you know all rainbows are full circles and most times we are only able to see about half of it (hence the arc)? And that we are only able to see rainbows with the sun behind us and only when the light source is at 42 degrees to the observer? And centuries before Newton, the likes of Aristotle and Seneca have pondered and theorised about the rainbow with astounding insight? This knowledge surely adds rather than diminishes the allure and lustre of one of the most beautiful of natural phenomenon.

So what else has science taught us? Darwin has shown that we share common ancestors to all other living things; modern molecular genetics confirm this and show we share approximately 98% of our genes with other great apes like chimpanzees and orangutans, confirming the kinship everyone instinctively feel when laying eyes on these close cousins (and also about 80% with mice and 50% with bananas). This modern science has also proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the difference between ‘races’ of humans are non-existent – that we as a specie is so close to each other, if we were dogs, we would all be the same breed. With the understanding of this knowledge, the iniquitous and insidious notion of racism is denied any oxygen.  The study of geology, palaeontology and molecular biology has also combined forces and informed us that our species has barely made it through the gauntlet of time; that those who made the exodus out of Eastern Africa was whittled down to a few thousand. Homo Sapiens indeed almost joined our cousins the Neanderthals in the long list of creatures that have since become extinct. In fact an estimated 99.8% of all living species that have ever existed have since become extinct. A sobering thought that should encourage us to appreciate our luck to be here at all and cherished those close to us.

Copernicus and Galileo freed the world from the Aristotelian geocentric view of the universe, stripping away the false shroud of egocentricity we like to wrap around ourselves and undoing the lie told with certainty to children by the church.  From the works of the likes of the great Persian polymath Omar Khayyam and Giordano Bruno (for which and other heresies he was burnt at the stake) to modern day astronomy and astrophysics championed by the likes of Stephen Hawkin, Carl Sagan, Lawrence Krauss and Victor Stenger, we realise that our solar system is but a tiny suburb in our galaxy, which itself is only a minor speck in an ever expanding universe containing, according to a recent estimation by German supercomputers, 500 billion other galaxies. Not only is this a stupendously awe-inspiring thought it is also, I would argue, a humbling one.

With human’s first trepidatious steps off our sapphire planet through the combined melding of collective knowledge, skills, aspirations and dreams of individuals from branching disciplines including metallurgy, chemistry, physics, astrology, mathematics and biology, we were able to finally see our own planet in photos such as The Blue Marble, taken by the crew of Apollo 17 from about 45 thousand kilometres away. But perhaps the most  transcendent photo of our planet is called The Pale Blue Dot, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 about 6 billion kilometres from Earth at the request of Carl Sagan. A dot so small as almost to be invisible, floating in the cold darkness of space, Sagan captioned it wonderfully in his book Pale Blue Dot:

‘Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’

Earth - the barely discernible dot in the beam of sunlight on the left 

As most stars have a lifespan of only 5-10 billion years, and that many stars are more than 5 billion light-years away from us, when you look up at the night sky, many of the stars that twinkle down are no longer there. They are so far away that their light has travelled billions of years to reach our retina so that what we see is literally billions of years into the past. If, perchance, intelligent creatures exist on another far away planet and they happen to turn their powerful telescope on us billions of years from now, they might, with a bit of luck, see the extinction of the dinosaurs or the Great Fire of London in 1666 or the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, or Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

From the womb of the doomed and misguided experimentations of the alchemists like Hermes Trismegistus and John Dee, modern chemistry was nonetheless born. Through happy accidents like Hennig Brand’s effort to find the philosopher’s stone by concentrating urine in 1669, phosphorous (the name wonderfully meaning ‘light-bearer’) was discovered. Joseph Priestley, the English chemist, who discovered oxygen, had his laboratory smashed by a royalist mob who opposed his support of the French Revolution. He, like the great and much underappreciated English pamphleteer Thomas Paine, ended up crossing the seas to America, where he worked with Benjamin Franklin on experimenting with electricity.

The advances in understanding the elements that make up the universe led to Mendeleev’s periodic table and later to the understanding that heavier elements are made in stars by fission of hydrogen. It doesn’t take long from there to arrive at the mind-blowing realisation that the atoms which make up you and me and every other individual are elements forged in the heart of stars for billions of years. Only upon their death do these celestial bodies give up their greedily horded treasures, spilling their enriched essence in cataclysmic explosions across the universe which then gather and spiral in a waltz that goes on for eons until they form new galaxies, new stars, new planets and us. If you will allow poetic license, we are all composed of star dust. Look at your hands; the atoms making up those hands are most likely from many different stars that had to die so that you may live. ‘Make me one with the universe’, the Buddhists say; they don’t realise we are all already one with the universe. Or, parts of the universe are in us. For those who say that science lacks the awe of spiritualism and religion, I would argue that this single piece of knowledge is more awe-inspiring than anything in the Bible, with the added value of being demonstrably true. 

The Eagle Nebula, which contains the so-called Pillars of Creation where new stars are born

J. B. S. Haldane, the great biologist once remarked that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” With recent exploration into quantum physics, about which Richard Feynman said ‘if you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory’, it is possible that our brains, the most complex thing in the known universe, don’t have enough horsepower to grapple with it fully. Although modern neuroscience is a very new discipline, philosophers have turned their powerful minds onto itself since Hippocrates, who recognised that all emotions arise from the brain – how he did so in 400 B.C. is beyond me. Weighing about 3 pounds or 1.5 kilograms, it is where all of what you perceive, what you feel, what you remember, what you dream and hope for are synthesised. Reality as each of us experiences it is entirely made up by the brain; for example colours are simply markers used by the brain to denote different wavelength of light – they don’t ‘exist’ in any real sense outside a brain. Many scientists think that bats might hear in colour as large parts of their brain, including parts anatomically analogous to what we use to decipher sight is devoted to hearing. Colours for bats may differentiate different textures or distances as their echo bounce back to their sensitive ears. Indeed dogs might smell in colour for the same reason.

The brain is made up of about 80-90 billion neurons and perhaps a dozen times more astrocytes – supportive cells that maintain a healthy environment for neurons, making the brain containing about as many cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. Indeed, the word astrocyte is derived from the Greek astron, meaning star for their stellar shape. In your skull therefore is a miniature galaxy of cells busily firing off electric charges and making new connections as each neuron contain thousands of axons to other neurons through which electrical pulses travel as in telephone wires to relay messages at incredible speeds. Although I’m sure we’ve all felt like the poet Robert Frost, who quipped ‘the brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and doesn’t stop until you get into the office’, the brain is undoubtedly an amazing piece of evolutionary achievement. Many mysteries of the brain, like how memories are formed and stored and recalled and lost, what baseline activity of brain at rest mean, why we sleep and dream, how the brain makes accurate and likely simulations of future events using past memories as guides and hints, and what consciousness is still elude us. But with each new day, each new piece of data, we edge closer towards better understanding. 

With every discovery, ten new questions arise. Socrates foresees this when he says that ‘the only wisdom is knowing you know nothing.’ The depth of the unknown is endless. That in itself is an amazing thing and it means that the poetry of science, the poetry of reality, shall be endless.