Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences
- Part I The Public Cultures of the Physical Sciences After 1800
- 1 Theories of Scientific Method
- 2 Intersections of Physical Science and Western Religion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 3 A Twisted Tale: Women in the Physical Sciences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 4 Scientists and Their Publics: Popularization of Science in the Nineteenth Century
- 5 Literature and the Modern Physical Sciences
- Part II Discipline Building in the Sciences: Places, Instruments, Communication
- Part III Chemistry and Physics: Problems Through the Early 1900s
- Part IV Atomic and Molecular Sciences in the Twentieth Century
- Part V Mathematics, Astronomy, and Cosmology Since the Eighteenth Century
- Part VI Problems and Promises at the End of the Twentieth Century
- Index
- References
5 - Literature and the Modern Physical Sciences
from Part I - The Public Cultures of the Physical Sciences After 1800
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences
- Part I The Public Cultures of the Physical Sciences After 1800
- 1 Theories of Scientific Method
- 2 Intersections of Physical Science and Western Religion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 3 A Twisted Tale: Women in the Physical Sciences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 4 Scientists and Their Publics: Popularization of Science in the Nineteenth Century
- 5 Literature and the Modern Physical Sciences
- Part II Discipline Building in the Sciences: Places, Instruments, Communication
- Part III Chemistry and Physics: Problems Through the Early 1900s
- Part IV Atomic and Molecular Sciences in the Twentieth Century
- Part V Mathematics, Astronomy, and Cosmology Since the Eighteenth Century
- Part VI Problems and Promises at the End of the Twentieth Century
- Index
- References
Summary
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) loved to tell the story of his close encounter with poetry while a graduate student in physics at Princeton. Sitting in on a colloquium in which “somebody” analyzed the structural and emotional elements of a poem, Feynman was set up as an impromptu respondent by the graduate dean, who was confident that the situation would elicit a strong reaction. To the literary scholar’s inquiry, “Isn’t it the same in mathematics …?” Feynman was asked to relate the problem to theoretical physics. He tells us about his reply:
“Yes, it’s very closely related. In theoretical physics, the analog of the word is the mathematical formula, the analog of the structure of the poem is the interrelationship of the theoretical bling-bling with the so-and-so” – and I went through the whole thing, making a perfect analogy. The speaker’s eyes were beaming with happiness.
Then I said, “It seems to me that no matter what you say about poetry, I could find a way of making up an analog with any subject, just as I did for theoretical physics. I don’t consider such analogs meaningful.”
Like other anecdotes in Feynman’s memoirs, this story – in both its enactment and retelling – is framed upon a frequently recurrent motif of clever one-upmanship that displays several constituent characteristics of his psychology and personality. The special notice he takes of the smile he is about to wipe off the speaker’s face participates in the kind of intellectual sadism that Feynman later enjoyed as the perpetrator of elaborate practical jokes, some with near life-and-death consequences.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 91 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
References
, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
, ed., Literature and Science as Modes of Expression (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ed. “Literature and the Scientific Revolution,” in The Scientific Revolution: An Encyclopedia, (New York: Garland, 2000).Google Scholar
, A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution and Chaos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).Google Scholar
, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).Google Scholar
, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).Google Scholar
, ed., Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).Google Scholar
, Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1986), esp..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The “Scientific Movement” and Victorian Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982).Google Scholar
, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, Literature and Quantum Theory: The Reception of Modern Physics in Literary and Philosophical Works in the German Language, 1925–70 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995).Google Scholar
, “Transdisciplinary Intersections: Astronomy and Three Early English Poets,” in New Directions for Teaching and Learning: Interdisciplinary Teaching, no. 8, ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Dec. 1981).Google Scholar
, ed., Songs from Unsung Worlds: Science in Poetry (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, and the Cosmic Heroines of His Minor and Major Fiction (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming 2002).Google Scholar
, “‘All Danaé to the Stars’: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Women in the Cosmos,” Victorian Studies, 40, no. 1 (Autumn 1996).Google Scholar
and , Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
, ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).Google Scholar
, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
, ed., One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).Google Scholar
, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Rhetoric of Antinuclear Fiction: Persuasive Strategies in Novels and Films (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
, Soviet Fiction Since Stalin: Science, Politics and Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1986).Google Scholar
, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
, “Newton and the French Muse,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 29, no. 3 (June 1958).Google Scholar
, Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981).Google Scholar
and , eds., Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
, ed., Literature and Science: Theory and Practice (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
et al. The Relations of Literature and Science: An Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship, 1880–1980, (New York: Modern Language Association, 1987).Google Scholar
, ed., American Literature and Science (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992).Google Scholar
, “Poetics Against Itself: On the Self-Destruction of Modern Scientific Criticism,” PMLA, 104 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , eds., Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Encounter, 12, no. 6 (1959), and 13, no. 1 (1959) (repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).Google Scholar
, Made in America: Science, Technology and American Modernist Poets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
, Fiction in the Quantum Universe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).Google Scholar
, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
, Mechanism and the Novel: Science in the Narrative Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and The Twain Meet: The Physical Sciences and Poetry (American University Studies, Series XIX: General Literature, 23) (New York: Lang, 1989)Google Scholar
, Einstein and Modern French Drama: An Analogy (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983).Google Scholar
- 2
- Cited by