Scientific research has its ups and downs, its bounteous harvests and dry spells, its joys and frustrations. But how often does it have its poetry?
I started to ponder this issue while I was interviewing the singer/songwriter Billy Bragg for Nature. Our hour-long slot was nearly up: we’d reached a natural pause in the animated discussion; the Wellcome staff and playwright Mick Gordon had left us alone for the last few minutes. Sun was slanting through the glass walls of the meeting room, insulating us from the bustle of the Euston Road below. Our tea had gone cold, and there was one final answer that I wanted from him – and it had nothing to do with the new play that had been the central focus of our chat.
It was clear from his previous responses that, like many people, he held a mixed view of scientists and their profession. On the one hand, he was obviously wary of the possible abuses inherent in the study of human genetics, and his references to scientists were often couched in isolating terms: “you lot mess[ing] around in lab coats behind closed doors”, for example. Yet despite these references, and claiming to have failed physics at school, he professed a deep admiration for science and the study of the nature world that seemed sincere to me – especially the science of dark matter, which he said he’d been avidly following in various science documentaries on television.
Why was this?
“I’m especially interested in the sorts of science that are inherently ambiguous,” he told me. “I’m interested in dark matter because you have to believe it’s there. I’m not a big fan of people like Richard Dawkins who talk only in absolutes with no room for doubt. The fundamental reality of the universe is intangible. It can’t be felt or detected: like the existence of dark matter, you have to take it on faith.”
I tried to explain to him that science is absolutely riddled with uncertainty, and any scientist who claims her results are absolute truth won’t get very far in her profession. He thought this was an interesting perspective because it did clash with his conception of scientists. We then decided that science had an image problem, and I asked him what he thought we could do to better it.
“Science needs more poetry,” he said immediately. “E=mc², now that was poetry – but it’s a rare example. Think about Dawkins versus William Blake. Dawkins says, “If you believe in God, you’re stupid.” And Blake says: ‘And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green?/And was the holy Lamb of God/ On England’s pleasant pastures seen?’ Blake was asking a question, not spouting absolutes. It’s no wonder that his words are still with us.”
Later when I was walking back to the lab, I kept going over this idea. Was E=mc² really poetic, or just a snappy sound-byte that people could remember, hooked into a larger concept that captured the popular imagination? Would people look upon us more favorably if we had more pithy equations, more moldy Petri dishes, more moon landings, more double helices – more accessible and memorable symbols or metaphors for significant findings that everyone could recognize as having value?
On balance, I think true poetry in science is probably a very rare thing. I have never had my own E=mc² moment, and most scientists never will. Indeed, the moments that contain the most beauty for me would probably be inscrutable to your average non-scientist.
Take my most memorable lab incident, about eight or nine years ago now, when I was researching in the Netherlands. I had been working tirelessly for months, trying to find definitive proof that the virus protein I was studying was phosphorylated not only in a test tube, but in actual living cells. The experiments were gruesome, involving millicuries of radioactive phosphorus, carried out behind Perspex screens in an isolation room; the heavy protective gear made you sticky with sweat, the Geiger counter was constantly screaming off the scale and, no matter how careful you were, the mucky lysis and immunoprecipitation steps with that much radiation invariably led to contaminated benches, trays, racks and centrifuges, all of which had to be completely decontaminated before leaving the room. The result of all this fuss was a tiny, blazing-hot gel dried down onto a piece of Whatman paper and exposed in the freezer to X-ray film for a few hours, in hopes of seeing that telltale black band of phosphorylated protein.
One day my nail-biting wait time for film exposure happened to coincide with a leaving party on the third floor. Such “borrels”, as they’re known in Dutch, are frequent and absence is frowned upon, so I made an appearance upstairs on my way to the dark room. Now, these radioactive labelling experiments were not only tiring, but were also timed in such a way that I almost always missed lunch. So it was perhaps no surprised that that the first biertje hit me rather hard, and the handful of spicy borrelnoten was not enough to stave off an acute attack of tipsiness.
When my timer went off, I staggered down to the darkroom, fumbled my film into the machine and fretted in the red twilight for the result to come out the other end. When it did, I could immediately see two things: first, that I’d fed the film in at a drunken 45-degree angle and half of the gel had not been exposed.
But before I could get too angry at my carelessness, I noticed the second thing: that the region of the gel I’d managed to expose showed the first definite proof that my theory was correct. I ran back up to the party to wave the film at my boss, and after dancing around in glee, he dubbed the wonky film the “borrel gel”. I re-exposed the film properly, of course, and replicated the experiment several more times – and the rest is history. I doubt anyone else would see the poetry in that amazing moment except for those for whom this became a piece of much laughed-over lab lore. But for me, I will never be able to separate the finding – in its own way beautiful – from the unconventional, rosy-tinted and cockeyed moment in which it was revealed to me.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Hmmmm. A great example of art leaving science in the dust when it comes to poetry. We haven’t a chance, have we?
Oh, I dunno. Despite Scurry’s protestations, I still like Fresnel hair. Admittedly that’s not about an experiment, but this is.
I do think there’s a fine line between poetry and sound-bytes/sybomlism, in science or anywhere else. I’m sure some humanities types have written theses on the topic. I’m curious if the people who recognize Einstein’s equation are associating their admiration with the actual science behind it, or if it’s just a sort of stand-in for, ‘oh, there’s something cool about this but we don’t exactly understand what’.
As Jenny should remember, I’m not wild about poetry and science.
But I am wild about Billy Bragg, which is why I find some of his comments depressing. It’s true that absolutism of any stripe is dangerous, but it does not follow from this that all ideas are equally sensible. I tend to find that when people talk about ‘ambiguity’ they’re really saying that they want to be able to believe what they like, whatever the evidence says.
That’s totally understandable and natural, and human (remember, we are all human. Although I do have my doubts about some members of the Conservative party. And Hazel Blears). But it does rather get in the way of doing science. There’s no room for ambiguity in the pages of a journal.
I also think Billy’s being a bit unfair paraphrasing Dawkins while allowing Blake to be quoted in full. RD says a lot of stuff, and I don’t agree with all of it, but it is quite unfair to suggest it is quite as abbreviated and crass as it is made out here. Dawkins has produced some sublime prose writing about science, and it’s a shame that despite this he’s a convenient punch bag for anyone who takes issue with atheism (though to be fair, it’s a job he applied for vigorously).
@Bill The problem with looking for poetry in things, whether in science writing or research data, is that what resonates with you is probably always going to be arbitrary and, by definition, unfair. Bragg was saying that he didn’t like scientists who rammed certainties down his throat – but if there are scientists like that out there, they are going to be more noticeable than other scientists who don’t speak so strongly about their own work – and what grates will be the thing you remember. Perhaps for Bragg, Dawkins’s absolutes are what stand out, and grate. It’s unfortunate if it’s not a representative stance, but it’s human nature that certain things just stick. (Note that Bragg doesn’t take issue with atheism, so he’s not punching RD for that in particular.)
I’m not sure I agree with you that what’s in scientific papers is absolute truth. The vast majority of what we publish is a compromise, surely: an interpretation, a best estimate of this elusive thing we call truth, liable to refinement and sometimes, to being overturned.
@Jenny I think you’re missing my point. I didn’t say that scientific papers contained ‘absolute truth’, which is good because I wouldn’t want to claim that for a moment. But they are short on ambiguities. And where ambiguities exist, they are carefully delimited to figure out what they might mean for the message of the paper.
I agree that in doing science we are in the business of continually improving our models of the world, and this means we have to be humble about our findings. I agree that it might be helpful for scientists to emphasise this part of the process. But the question is begged how much ambiguity is ‘too much’. It helps us not a jot to pretend that homeopathy, say, is supported by evidence. Or is an optional part of a scientific worldview under some criterion of ambiguity.
This is what’s difficult – how can we convey the importance to science of being open minded, while also showing that all ideas are not worth serious consideration.
I don’t think that in saying “There’s no room for ambiguity in the pages of a journal”, Bill was laying a claim of absolute truth. I understood him to mean that scientific writing tends to eschew the ambiguity of meaning that can so enrich poetry.
The freedom that one has in writing a poem or, dare I say it, a blog-post is much greater, I find, that when sitting down to write a paper, where all the caveats and controls have to be laid out explicitly.
That said, I think there can be great poetry in science and in scientific discoveries but I guess it is rare. I have enjoyed certain moments of epiphany down through the years though I recollect that they were exciting and satisfying rather than poetic.
And finally, can I say that I found a great deal of poetry (or was it artistry) in Bronowski’s Ascent of Man? Can it be a coincidence that he was also a Blake scholar?
update, have now read the original interview. And realise I may be over egging Billy’s enthusiasm for ambiguity. As he states it in the interview, it’s sounds at least a first cousin to scientific debate if not a full sib.
Yes, sorry, I see what you mean now. I guess what we can be open-minded about, as scientists, has to do with how much evidence already exists. I often think about Maddox’s decision to publish the original water memory paper in Nature – he probably didn’t believe it for a second, and the referees didn’t either, but the experiments seemed sound and on balance, publication seemed the right thing to do – and I guess nothing like that had ever been touted before. If you tried to get away with this sort of thing now, there’d be preference for turning you away at the door.
I do think that sometimes scientists can be too absolute about their theories. And if those sorts are the sort that like to talk to the media, it doesn’t send a good message.
I’m scared of/don’t understand/avoid poetry, but I loooooove when something in science just “fits”, like concepts from network theory being the same for protein interactions and airline connections, or explanations being found for the lefthandedness of the universe (was in the news this week – can’t be bothered to find it again). Maybe that’s a kind of poetry? It probably isn’t, because I don’t understand poetry, but it makes me disproportionally happy anyway.
Bill, Stephen, all our comments crossed – sorry.
Stephen, I’d love to hear more about your epiphanies – these are the sorts of science stories that really inspire me. I find more poetry in the processes than in the findings, most days – a migrating dye-front on a protein gel can be a thing of beauty, for example, even though its informational content is nonexistent.
Bill, it’s very hard to distill a one-hour interview into 800 words, and I didn’t have any control over what stayed and what got cut. But that bit in the published piece you mentioned is an accurate snapshot of the overall view, I think.
Eva, I think that is indeed poetry. It’s a good example of beauty in science that’s a bit more abstract. And of course, probably even harder to convey to your average person as a result.
“viral death protein”. There’s some poetry, right there!
I’ve never had a eureka moment either, but I have had the pleasure of seeing the right band show up in the right position on a gel. Not so much “eureka!” as “oh thank f*%# I don’t need to rethink my entire hypothesis in the month I have left in this postdoc position”. Not very poetic at all… but I was inspired to get into genetics in the first place by a fantastic high school biology teacher’s lesson on Mendelian genetics. The way she told that story was poetry indeed.
That reminds me, I started but never finished a series of blog posts on excellent teachers. I must resurrect that project some time…
I’m sure the last person that quoted that Blade Runner speech on NN was Stephen Curry…
Re. poetry / ambiguity / science, I think you can find sentences with some poetry all around science and scientific writing, if you keep your eyes open. Though as already said, it is very personal what one finds poetic, so perhaps we have less “universally acknowledged great poetic scientific lines.” Perhaps we should each do a post with some personal favourites? One of mine is Feynman’s:
“The first principle [of scientific integrity] is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool”
Re the Dawk, I’m not a great fan of his more flowery prose, but you can’t deny the man’s gift with words. Perhaps my favourite aphorism of his was written for a jacket blurb on one of Norman Levitt’s books and reprinted in Dawkins’ brief obituary of Levitt last year:
“There is a real world, we live in it, true and false things can be said about it, science is how we find out about it, and it really matters.”
Now that’s real poetry.
I guess if you’re a musician who enjoys ambiguity, it doesn’t matter how skilled or poetic a writer a person is if the content is black and white. That’s one of the pities about RD – the atheism thing is only one small part of what he writes about, but its shrillness is probably enough to turn some people off to all the other good things he has to say.
Cath, I know what you mean about good teachers (and I hope you do more blog posts on them). A good narrative is so important for inspiring people, in the classroom as well as in life. Science is one of those subjects that can sing in some hands, and stultify in others…
So Alom’s students will be singing.
Good point. Important to work some poetry in when those students come to shadow me this summer. Confocal microscopy with three colors is probably pretty magical if you’ve never seen cells up close before.
I’m with Ava on this. Plenty of things strike me as elegant, or “neat”, or awesome, or subtly insightful, or what-have-you in the way that poetry might.
When I write ‘plenty’, I don’t mean that I run into them every day, but that they occur often enough that they’re not “one time” events.
They are hard to covey to people outside of science, but them’s the breaks I guess.
I’ve had a few small insights from spending hours working through the literature putting pieces together that I’ve liked, as I’m sure we all have. Nothing earth-shaking. Also can’t get funding to work on them unfortunately either, at least in NZ. Grr.
It’s probably easier to show others this visually—? Some crystal structures are remarkably striking for example.
E=Mc squared was entirely abstract. I always thought it was catchy and memorable because of the way it scanned. That example does show that things don’t need to be visual to capture the public imagination – though am struggling to think of another example.
Please tell me you didn’t come up with the name “Apoptin”…
I was going to say something about the wealth of visual artistry inherent in science, but (a) it’s been mentioned already, and (b) I think I’d be missing the point.
[hour and a half break for building-clearing Hazmat spill 11 floors below]
Ah here we are again. I’m not sure where I stand on the “sound bite” vs. “poetry” thing – there are plenty of poems that are of sound-bite length. For Einsteinian things, the famous formula becomes a bit less poetic once you start including the Euclidean norm, of course.
Richard, it strikes me that “building-clearing Hazmat spill” would be perfect in the middle of a haiku.
No, I didn’t name it that. It sounded even funnier in Dutch (“apop-tinah”). I always used VP3 in conversation. Interesting protein, though.
oh oh Miss! Miss!
Euler’s identity, Miss!
Hm, that would add a certain ee cummings (oh no, cue RPG debating the correct capitalization of that… again) kind of feel:
“Science poetry”?
(building-clearing Hazmat spill)
a lost train of thought.
Re Apoptin (and other sound-a-like names). I reckon there needs to be an Apoptome… as in
“Apoptome and then decided I wasn’t coming back. Ever”
Something I rather feel like doing whenever I read another article about science funding post the UK election…
PS Wintle’s Haiku is brilliant, by the way – deserves a post to itself. Or perhaps we could have a competition in which the first and last lines of the Haiku are the same, but there can be different middle lines, all summarising the tendency for lofty poetic thoughts to be interrupted by the more mundane aspects of working in science..
…I thank you greatly.
(syllables are hard to find)
King of apoptome.
I really to like ee/E.E./e.e./EE Cummings/cummings – true mastery of the tangential-thought-in-the-middle-of-the-poem school.
I pour the cream.
“Science poetry”?
(paper rejected…again)
a lost train of thought.
“Science poetry?”
(imaging system breaks down)
a lost train of thought
– or perhaps more generally:
“Science poetry?”
(bloody machine broke again)
a lost train of thought
All this has just randomly reminded me of a brilliant grad student Christmas sketch we once had when the PhD candidates sang ‘the 12 days of Christmas’ with all the phrases replaced with the sorts of things that the grad student advisors might promise their young charges. One of them, if I recall correctly, was “grant-supported head-shrink”.
I’d love to see Mr Braggs’ comment as the lead off to a typical peer-reviewed paper’s Methods section: “The fundamental reality of the universe is intangible. It can’t be felt or detected: like the existence of dark matter, you have to take it on faith.” That would be the peer-review Journal of Irreproducible Results I spose.
There’s room for faith and science in an average day. But science’s uncertainties, ambiguities, and unknowns are different from Mr Braggs’ intangibles. Most scientists I know will admit to uncertainty, but they intend to clear that up as soon as funding permits.
Science does have an image problem, but I don’t think poetry is quite the answer. Poetry has an image problem too, and isn’t half as well funded. When I was in high school, neither were cool. Science and poetry have too much in common I’m afraid. Both scientists and poets are a bit too obsessive for comfort, a bit too precise, and a bit too concerned about reproducible results (for the scientist, method and outcome, for the poet, emotion).
I suspect you’re right, Michael. Perhaps the real answer, as I’ve written before, is much more tawdry and far less romantic: we just need some decent PR.
Meanwhile, I love your Methods section. In fact, I like the idea of taking random lines from published newspaper articles and slotting them into scientific papers. Wouldn’t be as surreal as half of the papers I had to plow through today.
I like this idea. Most Methods sections would benefit from the judicious addition of a bit of Lorem ipsum, as well.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with finding, and appreciating, poetry in pure experimental process – and this surely is something a lot of people don’t realise about science. My electrochemist flatmate used to come home from his evening pottery class full of frustration at his failure to get across to one particular woman that what he mostly did all day was not hard thinking but the delicate, artistic construction of the miniature kit he needed to build to examine his immiscible electrolyte interfaces. I’m sure it was the refluxing liquid in a fractional distillation column that first seduced me into chemistry; not the thought of its Industrial Applications or the dry phase diagram that explained it, but the sight of the dancing solvent front climbing up the studded glass tube as the apparatus heated, bringing a whole carnival of trickling droplets and swirling vapour behind it. The best techniques for me are the ones that encode their informational content in a poetic process – chromatographers will know what I mean, as will electrochemists: the taste of the suspense when the ‘go’ button is clicked and you stare at the screen watching the voltammogram trace itself out at fifty millivolts a second, hardly daring to breathe, waiting for the oxidation wave.
I think you might be wasted at the bench, Tom: thanks for the lovely description.
Meanwhile, Wintey, I’ve written a haiku just for you:
Lorem ipsum do
lor sit amet, consecte
tur adipisic
Awwww, thanks. blush
And I agree – that was beautifully poetic, Tom. Doesn’t work quite so well for molecular biology: “then I pipetted a miniscule amount of colourless liquid into another miniscule amount of colourless liquid, and stuck it in a waterbath for 12 hours…” 😉
We molecular biologists take poetry where we can find it.
And if we can’t find any, we darned well clone some.
I can’t find anything at the moment. New Nature Network and all.
I’m not saying anything. Somebody might hit me.
I think they put it behind the settee.
It’s covered in fluff.
Well, blush. Thanks! But if I weren’t at the bench, where would I get my material? Actually I’m not at the bench all that often these days, spending more time wrestling with the configuration of a LIMS – and anyone who can get poetry out of that is a better man or woman than I. Molecular biology poetry though – that’s what I read Jennifer’s blog for. What are the rest of you doing here? 😉
But I do think there’s something especially perfect about cyclic voltammetry. It can offer all the triumph and tragedy of, say, a football match, or an election night, condensed into a two minute experiment.
I have no idea what LIMS or cyclic voltammetry are, but I know which one I’d rather have in a limerick.
A professor of cyclic voltammetry
Said – in tones that were loud and declamatory –
‘Fick’s laws of diffusion
Present no confusion!’
Which her students found somewhat inflammatory.
I admit that took me a while.
Hahahaha!
(Sorry for not laughing sooner, but we no longer have that nice archive feature that the old NN had which made it possible to see all your blogs and comment numbers in one list, so you could monitor all recent posts in one glance.)
MT 5 will fix that.
I’ll get used to it one of these days.
I miss that feature too, Jenny. Do we dare tell Lou about it?
I think if I say “We get that on WordPress/Blogger” again I am going to get told off, so perhaps someone else should do it.
Nice cyclic voltammetry limerick, BTW. I sort of vaguely remember what the voltammograms look like from my (very) long ago chemistry degree.
I already asked for it in the forums, ages ago, but not sure if it got answered. I don’t think it did. There are so many other things that are more important to fix, I don’t think that would be a priority.
A voltammogram sounds like something a mate might send to your doorstep on a stag do.
Or a new type of breast-screening unit.
sorry, breast cancer screening unit. Doh. Back to the scrambled eggs.
Or a measuring unit for Burkina Faso.