ON TOPIC
Strange World:
The Metadiscourses Between the Poet,
Scientist, and Neuroscience
Neural Tree by Julia Buntaine. Image courtesy of artist.
By Pamela Segura
Contributor
Bound by History and Method
In the September-October 2010 issue of
American Scientist, Anna Lena Phillips explores
the ways in which poets used versification—the
act of writing in verse rather than in prose—to
publicize scientific concepts. She notes that,
following the Scientific Revolution, “Booklength treatises in verse elaborated discoveries
in botany, astronomy and medicine.” These
discourses were meant to promote science
education and increase literacy. The poets, in
turn, would benefit from the exposure of a
public audience interested in science becoming
more than just a series of data.
At times, scientists were also poets, turning
their own examinations and inquiries into verse.
English mathematician and physicist Lewis Fry
Richardson imbued his scientific essays with
quatrains. Upon presenting on his most famed
breakthrough—the Richardson criterion, a
number that represents the ratio of potential
to kinetic energy— in 1920, Richardson
introduced his topic with a four-line poem that
alluded to Jonathan Swift’s poems and satires.
Other times, the poetic interpretations of
science led to a few problematic liberties at
the hands of the writers. Erasmus Darwin, an
English physician, poet, and grandfather of the
SciArt in America October 2014
more famous Darwin, imposed upon plants
complex human emotions in his 1791 thesis.
This slip-up seems to foreshadow The Secret Life
of Plants, a book published in 1973 wherein Peter
Tomkins and Christopher Bird suggested that
plants were sentient beings with musical tastes
and the ability to feel grief.
As questionable as it might seem now, the
romanticism of the works of Tomkins, Bird, and
Darwin highlights the different ways in which
science and poetry—as well as the scientists
and poets themselves—are connected.
Poems and papers documenting scientific
experiments are both forms of communication
that necessitate skill, patience, and a certain
display of conf