Address to the Australian Science and Mathematics School

August 14^th 2007

 First –  I acknowledge the Kaurna people, the traditional owners and custodians of what we now call the Adelaide Plains.

 Next, I introduced Dr Michael Deves, the publisher of Lythrum Press. He  had published work of mine before and would be publishing Poetry and Science: An Invitation to Connections. He has a background in physics and psychology and a PhD in Literature from Flinders University.

Poetry and Science

'Students of ASMS may be like a student I had at Marion High School although it does not seem like 16 years ago. He wrote this poem about independence. He was in Year 11

Safety constrains me

like a strait-jacket.

My sheltered life

like an asphyxiating shroud.

When shall I be released

from my prison of liabilities

and rise up

as if on the wings of eagles

into the bliss of independence?

                                                     Michael Brown.

 On the subject of old age, back in 1991, before we had the idea of ‘grey nomads’ gadding about and others graduating with a higher degrees in their 80s and 90s another student wrote this poem.

A skeletal frame, fragile, frail and weak

With hands covered by the markings of age

Folded and blemished, wrinkled and flaccid.

Veins like rivers and eyes cloudy like mist.

Independence ignored by the impatience

Of a patronising society.

Trapped by circumstances and frustration.

Just another old man resigned to fate

Left, confined to a life of memories.

 Allyson Grout

 Why am I here talking about connecting poetry and science as one aspect of the study of English when the convention has been that poetry and science are the antithesis – at the extreme opposites – of one another?  ‘Science and poetry are,’ as Elizabeth Truswell says, ‘two sides of the one coin,’

I’m here because it is not true to see them as ‘two separate cultures’. Imagination does not belong in one area and reason in the other. Both belong in both. Discovery does not belong in one area and creativity in the other. Both belong in both. That rather convenient separation of the sciences from poetry has been part of the separation of the mind from matter, the intellect from emotion, the mind from the body, in what has been called the Cartesian principle. It placed abstraction and the realm of intellectual endeavour above all else. It ignored the structure of the human being and the fact that we are beings feeling, laughing, crying, learning, questioning, experimenting – one way and another – from the moment we are born.

How many of you, in the course of your lives have been labelled? Recently the journalist father of a girl who won an English prize wondered why she valued it because, at university, she was going to study science. He had ‘pigeon-holed’ his own daughter apparently unaware of the concerns expressed by top scientists that brilliant young scientists cannot write well enough to be understood. [Oxford University now has a Chair for the Public Understanding of the Sciences.]

Over half a century ago, as a humanities student, my friend who was a mathematical physicist called me ‘one of the clawless tigers’. He was not afraid of using metaphors when he wanted to make me feel inadequate. But gradually, from 1966 onwards, I have been discovering the truth, helped most recently by the writing of wonderful scientists whose work has been acknowledged internationally for its literary quality. I want students to have access to their writing as part of their English course. I want students to have access to the dialogue going on between scientists and poets. I want students to have access to the poetry of scientists and poetry that tackles aspects of both the wonder and worry of engagement in the sciences. Some of it is the best writing I have come across in the realm of non-fiction.

We know now that the kind of labelling that made some people ‘non-scientists’ or ‘non-academics’, ‘heads’ not ‘hands’ – notice the absence of ‘heart’ – came out of a way of thinking that was convenient for the followers of René Descartes, the French philosopher. He wrote ‘Cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think, therefore I am’. It helped him to develop this idea of the separation of mind and the world of abstractions from the messy, complex world of body-mind. It explained his existence in a way that satisfied him and it satisfied others until now.

But we know the mind cannot work without the body, without the brain, without the nervous system, without the senses that alert the consciousness to problems or possibilities, without the blood vessels that take the oxygen to the brain. But it has taken us two centuries to go back to the connections and scientists are helping us to do it. Therefore their writing should be part of the study of English in a world where ignorance of what is happening is dangerous. Our school curricula, in my view, have not yet caught up with the need for this balance.

If you listen to the poems, Michael could not have written his poem effectively without that technical term ‘asphyxiation’. You feel the intensity. Listen to the sounds in the word as they shut off life. He needed the image of the eagles to help the reader to feel the sense of freedom, the soaring glory of those majestic predators that represented for him the ‘bliss’ of independence. ‘Bliss’ is an old-fashioned word that takes me to Wordsworth who thought it was ‘bliss’ to be alive at the dawn of the French Revolution which was supposed to usher in the age of Reason, of ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’. Consider the quality of observation in Allyson’s poem, the clarity of imagery, the recognition of the impatience of a ‘patronising society’, the intelligence in the awareness of attitudes in society. Look at the connection of discovery, thought and feeling. Clarity and compassion. If I were a science teacher, I would be delighted to have a student with her capacity to be exact.

That is one of the reasons I came to the Australian Science and Mathematics School to see whether students here would accept the challenge to be aware of the connections. I met your Principal who is now concerned with approaches to education to meet ‘the new era’. I was invited to meet Mr O’Reilly who was interested enough to see whether students would take up the challenge to explore science in poetry and write poems that embraced the sciences, perhaps complemented them, or approached them in what Simon Armitage – an English poet – would call an adversarial way. You have done so and I congratulate you for taking the plunge.

Among the scientists who are supporting this project are Laureate Professor Peter Doherty, Nobel prize winning Professor of Immunology at the University of Melbourne, Professor Marcello Costa and Professor Ian Gibbins, both of Flinders, Dr Juliette Woods, with a PhD in Applied Mathematics, working in ground water modelling, dealing with the problems of salinity in the River Murray.

Among the scientists – many of them Nobel prize winners - who, are winners of the Lewis Thomas Award established in 1993 by the Rockefeller University are Lewis Thomas, Max Perutz, Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks, Jared Diamond, Thomas Eisner, two French scientists, Richard Fortey, - called the poet of geology. Lewis Thomas has been called ‘the poet of science’. Niels Bohr said that only the language of poetry was appropriate for some of the discoveries in twentieth century physics.

Where, often is the poetry? If we look at the 1816 changes to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary definition, it is to ‘lift the spirit, express emotional qualities, to please’ and I would add ‘to challenge’ as Miroslav Holub does. Wonder and awe are part of the sciences as they are in other aspects of life. Anxiety, fear, concern are part of the sciences as they are part of the other elements of life.

We are human beings with all the possibilities that entails before we are anything else. We are more than machines. Our spirits need to be lifted. Sometimes it happens through music, through art, through the beauty of the world available through the electron microscope, some times through the mystery. We are social and as such have codes of conduct. We have characters and we cannot separate any of that. Our education has, in the past, encouraged us to think in a different way. We are ‘one’ yet we are ‘many’ inside ourselves. So the holistic approach which recognises the significance of connections is the way to go. Flinders University is setting up a Centre for Science Education. Its Director is from a multi-disciplinary background, UniSA has an Eco Centre at Mawson Lakes where the emphasis is on the quality of thinking and feeling. Adelaide University is setting up a Research Institute on Climate Change which is multi-disciplinary and states clearly it intends to make connections with the humanities.  Politicians, ideologues of different kinds may prefer division but that is not the intelligent, open-minded, thoughtful way to go into the uncertainties of the future.'

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To my surprise and delight, the result of this address would be an anthology of students’ poems, entitled ‘Comets, Conical Flasks and Conundrums’ which became the last chapter of the book. In the poems, some young poets expressed concerns about our lives, our future. The collection was not just paeons of praise for science.

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A discovery about science students at Cambridge after World War II.

Science students asked for courses in English literature.

 In 2009 a friend would find a book The Apple and the Spectroscope, published by Methuen & Co Ltd, London, 1966. The author, T.R.Henn had been asked by science students in Cambridge in 1947 to help them understand English literature. The lectures they had asked for were to be given in the long vacation. The Heads of Scientific Departments supported the idea and the Faculty Board of English discussed a syllabus. This book contains the lectures prepared by T.R.Henn. What its discovery tells me is that not all young scientists, as C.P. Snow maintained in 1959, were dismissive of literature.

 Sir Lawrence Bragg, a Nobel prize winner with his father Sir William Bragg, would insist, in the Preface he wrote for that book seven years after C. P. Snow had first published The Two Cultures and the Science Revolution, that ‘Science [was] becoming so vast and specialized that it [was] increasingly difficult to keep abreast of development. Just as gold is mined from the earth with infinite labour to be buried again in the earth in vaults, so new knowledge may only be too easily buried in scientific journals until with the lapse of time it can no longer be of interest or influence the progress of science. It is as important to present new knowledge in a form in which it can be assimilated and its essential import realized as it is to discover it, and this presentation is an art akin to poetry and literature.’

 T. R. Henn, The Apple and the Spectroscope  Preface by W.L. Bragg, published by Methuen  General Studies Paperbacks, Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, paperback edition, 1966, [pp viii – ix]

 If that was true then, it is even more true now. Without exposure to poetry and literature how can scientists gain the capacity to write with that clarity and understanding of the human condition so that students, as citizens of the future, have the knowledge and understanding required to make thoughtful political decisions about what is needed for themselves, their families and one day their children as part of society in the future?