Science and Art: An Interdisciplinary History (Transcript)

Image credit: Watercolor portrait of Ada Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon around 1840. In the public domain. More information here: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ada_…e_portrait.jpg

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Science and Art - Episode 01: An Interdisciplinary History 

Martin Kratz:  Welcome to this segment of the podcast in which I'm speaking with Sam Illingworth who's a Senior Lecturer in science communication at Manchester Met. And I've asked Sam to start with a poem. 

Sam Illingworth: We astronomers are nomads, merchants, circus people. All the earth our tent, we are industrious, we breed enthusiasms honour, our responsibility to all. But the universe has moved a long way off. Sometimes I confess, starlight seems too sharp. Unlike the moon I moved my face to the ground. To the small patch where each foot falls, before it falls. And I forget to ask questions and only count things. 

That was ‘We Astronomers’ by Rebecca Elson. 

Martin:  So, I asked you to choose a poem. And obviously people listening to this won’t know this, but you recited that off by heart. 

Sam: Yes.  
 
Martin: Was that an easy choice to make?  

Sam: Yeah,  

Martin: Because I kind of put you on the spot with it. So why that poem? 

Sam:  So, for me, that poem is a really powerful reminder of why I do science, Rebecca Elson, who's one of the scientists I talk about in the book as well. She was this amazing Canadian astronomer who did the bulk of her work in the 1990s. She did a lot of work with the Hubble Space Telescope, making the first images of the early galaxy and early galaxy formation. And she kept these really beautiful, detailed lab books, which were almost poetic vignettes, which she then would work and turn into poetry. She only has one collection of poetry, called A Responsibility to Awe, released by Carcanet Press in 1999, shortly after she died, she died tragically young. And that poem, which is the first poem in that collection, has the line, a responsibility to awe, which always, you know, reminds me that as scientists, we have a responsibility awe, not just to improve, in scare marks, society, but also to inspire, and to awe, but also is those last lines where she talks about before I forget how to question and only count things, and it can be very easy to get lost in the miniature of what we're trying to do. And for me, that poem really reminds me of that and reminds me why I wanted to be a scientist. 

Martin: So you mentioned the book set A Sonnet to Science, in which you cover the relationship between science and poetry. 

Sam: So A Sonnet to Science is this exploration of six scientist poets and picked the early 1800s as a starting point, as that's really when science became quite formalised with the introduction of the word scientist by William Whewell, in a British Science Association meeting, spurred on by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, actually, he was like, well, if we're artists, then you need a word to describe who you are. And so you know, that was really where science became beyond just what rich amateurs would do into something that was a bit more formalised, which is why I picked the 1800s as a starting point, and then the poet's overlap each other, all the way up to Rebecca Elson at the the turn of this millennium, starting with Humphrey Davy. 

Martin:  And I'm sort of thinking of before you start, there's also a kind of point at which poetry and science are not so much divided partly because you have science written in verse, don't you is that right now? 

Sam:  Absolutely. I mean, so just just before Humphrey Davy, there was Erasmus Darwin, who was the great great grandfather of Charles Darwin. And he wrote his largest thesis as a two volume collection of poetry describing the entire botanical world in rhyming verse, and it's, it's phenomenal. Yeah, he has poetry in there that also actually discusses the Big Bang, and the universe expanding and contracting several hundred years before it was formally, you know, theorised in science. And absolutely, there's this, this concept that both science and poetry at the time they didn't exclude one another. So many people from Aristotle onwards, you know, were looking at the two as congruent rather than mutually exclusive ways of trying to understand the world and the way in which we live. And I'd argue that certainly from the 1800s onwards in Western culture that did become more delineated, and you had people like, you know Keats in his poem Lamia writing about this, removing the magic from the world that science offered. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a response to that called Sonnet to Science. Which was actually the starting point for this book because I, I love Edgar Allan Poe, but I fundamentally disagreed with what he was saying, this idea that science, you know, removes the beauty and magic from the world because actually it doesn't. It's the more we find out about the world through science, in my opinion, the greater we understand the magic trick, in a way. 

Martin:  Well now actually, with someone like Keats, I think despite what he says, you find his medical training and all the scientific elements of that creeping into his poetry all the time.  

Sam:  Absolutely. And you know, it was if we go into like the Romantics, you know, with Wordsworth, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were great friends, actually with Humphrey Davy, there was very much this association with science with technology. And the Romantics were against that and returned to nature. 

Martin:  And now of course, contemporary poets, I think, quite often find themselves as a kind of result of what you've described this kind of division. The dividing between poetry and science, find themselves probably when they do write about science find themselves writing from the outside.  

Sam: Absolutely  

Martin: Into it and often in really interesting, successful ways.  

Sam:  No, absolutely. And I think, you know, a lot of my actual research is around this relationship between science and poetry and how the two can be used together. And one of the things that always comes up is yes, but as scientists, any scientist can write poetry, but not any poet can do science. And I mean, I disagree again, fundamentally with that. I mean, obviously, there's certain equipment that's needed to do certain amounts of science, but really, when you boil down to it, science is about asking questions, not necessarily answering them but asking questions. And I'd argue that poetry to a certain extent is also about questioning what we do and I think that you know, really part of the purpose of me writing the book was to give an example of people who cut across both disciplines and how poetry in particular helped them to really accomplish what they accomplished, what they achieved, they would not have been able to achieve it if they hadn't have had the poetic sensibilities that they also had. So Ada Lovelace would be a good example. So Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron's daughter, was raised by her mother Annabella. And Annabella didn't want her daughter to grow up anything like Byron. So she basically forced on her this mathematical and science education, which for a young woman, at that time in, you know, the 1800s was just unheard of. And she was a brilliant scholar. And she was introduced to Charles Babbage, who was working on the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. And what Ada Lovelace realised, though, was actually that he'd created a machine that if you gave it anything, any series of tasks with the right programming, it would be able to accomplish them. And one of the things she said was, you know, that if you gave it the right musical notes, it would be able to write music, you know, if you're able to give it the right words, you'd be able to write poetry. And that analytical insight that she had only came about I theorise in part because she'd actually negated what my mother had said, and she'd continued to write poetry. So Byron never saw Ada again. But he dedicated several of his works to Ada. And you can really make the argument to some extent she might have been his muse. And you know his last words with Ada and he wanted to see his daughter and Ada through her writing, you know, she's constantly comparing herself to her father, both her and Byron's death were complications brought about by bloodletting from their physicians. Both died at the Same age 36. And her last words were to be buried alongside her father as well. So this is really interesting parallels between the between the two of them and between that the work of the two of them as well.  

Martin: When you were talking about Ada Lovelace and her kind of predictions for what she was working with Babbage on. I was really struck by the idea that fairly recently we've had all these computers writing poetry of computer-generated poetry often being put next to modernist verse, and then people basically doing a kind of Turing test. 

Sam: Yes, yes, yes.  

Martin: What's happening? I wonder if she could have I guess that she probably He sort of did foresee that in some ways. 

Sam: And it's really and you know Turing is an person as well to bring up because, you know, her work really predated Turing's concept of a universal computer by 100 years and her writings which really are limited to the translators notes, Babbage never wrote anything. He He gave a lecture once in Italy. And then Lovelace was asked to translate that to which she then added these. Oh, and by the way, if you only did this, you might think this. So these really small notes that had really quite a fundamental understanding and some of the other things that she wrote about in those translators notes, Turing himself actually acknowledges in his later papers, and so he makes reference to Lovelace as being a source of inspiration to him as well. 

Martin:  It's always interested me that her kind of work on this begins as a translator actually, and also that she sort of interferes and that sort of made me sort of think about what you do in science and communication and poetry and science and kind of these two things that have been divided, and that there seems to be a need to kind of translate between the others but you're actually saying there isn't. There's a kind of common ground which they both arise from. 

Sam:  She really did see herself as this translator. And she got incredibly infuriated by the fact that he was unable to communicate. I see her as one of the first science communicators because she was, as well as brilliant in her own right, she had this incredible capacity to be able to communicate exactly what was important to those various audiences as well. 

Martin: So that's kind of at one end of the work is the kind of this idea of the communication poetry possibly sits almost at the edge of each where they might meet. That's kind of where they interact. And you've described this with Ada, that it's kind of foundational this relationship to poetry is foundation to her approach to science. But I'm sure you talked about in your own work, sometimes turning to poetry to work out an idea or something, that kind of poetry as method? 

Sam:  When I'm doing science, and when I'm writing poems, I find that I definitely use the same not even the same part of my brain but like the same processes in doing the both of them and in being able to use poetry to interrogate what I'm doing scientifically, and the other way around as well is, for me really interesting. Of the people that are mentioned in the book, I think Miroslav Holub’s, probably the one who would people would most closely associate with being equal part poet, and the other part scientist, but he never really wanted it to be acknowledged as a poet, as much as he wanted to be acknowledged as a scientist. And again, you know, that part of the one of the themes going on through the book is that at some point, every single one of these people had to choose, you know, am I a poet, am I a Scientist, the argument trying to make is that we shouldn't have to choose. And actually we shouldn't be put into boxes when we’re 14, 15, 16 as, you're a poet, you're a scientist. I was encouraged to do maths, further Maths, Physics and Chemistry at A level but like I always wrote as well in my spare time and I think there's there's a tendency to pigeonhole people rather than to just enable them to be human beings with limitless potential, and to explore those those avenues for themselves. 

Martin:  I think that too, that somewhere, yeah you are pigeonholed very quickly. But I keep thinking I keep sort of picturing the reverse figure of some of the ones you're describing, say, where's the poet who's also an amateur scientist? 

Sam:  Absolutely. And and, you know, you, astronomy would be an obvious example for me, as an example, where amateur, in quotes, or experts versus non experts, I mean, and I know lots and lots of amateur scientists who are far more knowledgeable about science than I am. And I think that there's a danger sometimes with science, that it does become quite an exclusive thing and poetry can be like that as well. And I think that a lot of my work is about trying to break down those barriers as to like who can do science, how can we do science, and it's about making opportunities for people I think, and even though it sounds counterintuitive, I think that by demonstrating that poetry and science can be done together it actually creates an opportunity for both of them to become more diverse and more inclusive in their approach to that as well.  

Martin:  I asked you to start with a poem, if you had to conclude with one would you have one? 

Sam:  Yeah, okay. Yeah, I can conclude with a poem. Yeah. 

Martin: Okay, thank you. 

Sam: So, Richard Brautigan, who's a well-known Beat poet, he in 1967, he was invited to the California Institute of Technology Caltech to be the poet in residence, which is an amazing opportunity. You know, it's the Summer of Love. He's there for six months. And he's asked to document what life is like there. And this is the poem he comes up with: 

I don't care how God damn smart these guys are. I'm bored. It's been raining like hell all day long. And there's absolutely nothing to do. 

And that’s it. 

Martin: Yeah. 

Sam: And at first it’s like, oh, that's quite trite. But then you realise that if in six months that's the science that was communicated to him that maybe the the people at Caltech could have been doing a slightly better job. And for me, that's the beauty of poetry in that it really cut through that and created this snapshot of actually, maybe what they were doing wasn't so important after all.