Literature & Science

Some say the literary and scientific spheres never cross - we know better! Posts demonstrating the vitality of this cross-over: quotes, history, art, poetry and scientific research from the Renaissance to the present and beyond...

[litscienceculture]

Physics progresses most when it’s presented with paradoxes.

Lawrence Krauss, In Search of Nothing [x]

[litscienceculture]

He made the agreeable suggestion that after death it would be possible to compare notes with astronomers from other planets.

Genesis & Geology, Charles Coulston Gillespie (1959)

[litscienceculture]

“ . . . William Empson’s concept of ambiguity was a decidedly Cambridge invention; by getting rid of the either/or mentality that had been prevalent in literary analysis he was bringing to literary criticism a way of thinking inaugurated by Albert Einstein but familiar in the universe of the physicist Paul Dirac; the young and prodigious Empson . . . . was ‘the first man to see the literature of the past through quantum theory’s altered notion of reality.”

Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language (2000)

[variste]

"The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."

- Paul Dirac (via waugh-and-peace)

[litscienceculture]

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

[litscienceculture]

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

[litscienceculture]

In the second paragraph I declare without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' (note the scare quotes)... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor.

Alan Sokal quoted in Gross, John, The Oxford Book of Parodies, Oxford University Press, 2010, pg. 307

[utopiantrace]

“…. this means that intending students face a rather bewildering choice. On the one hand they are offered a narrow, somewhat inward-looking approach to literature. On the other, they face a kind of science-teaching which never mentions the social attitudes and background assumptions that influence scientific thought - indeed, one that often views any mention of these topics as vulgar and dangerous. Thus, they may study either the outer or inner aspect of human life, but must on no account bring the two together.”

Mary Midgley (via utopiantrace)

[litscienceculture]

Physical determinism, we might say in retrospect, was a daydream of omniscience which seemed to become more real with every advance of physics until it became an apparently inescapable nightmare.

Karl Popper (1972) 'Of Clouds and Clocks' in Objective Knowledge