Apparently Paul Dirac once said that ...'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' - but as much as I love a good line and witty argument - I have to disagree!
The intersection in the Venn Diagram opposite may be small, but it is not empty
Iggy McGovern has done much to fill that space over the years. As well as being a (wonderful) lecturer and professor in the TCD physics department, he has published 4 collections of poetry. My own favourite is A Mystic Dream of Four, in which he focuses on the life and work of William Rowan Hamilton. And in reading about it, I learned that Hamilton himself was also a fine poet (and friend of Wordsworth).
Elsewhere, he offers this....
Proverbs for the Computer Age
An Apple a day keeps the hacker away
Baud news travels fast
Better to light one Intel than to cursor the darkness
When the mat's away the mouse will play
Necessity is the motherboard of invention
Every blog has its day
Fight virus with virus
All that twitters is not scrolled
Let sleeping laptops lie
Beware of geeks bearing gifs
In other science/poetry intersections, I came across this great collection of poems about each element in the Periodic Table by Peter Davern of UL a few years ago at the Frontiers of Physics conference.
In it the poet 'discusses the science, history, and quirks of each element - things like why potassium reacts explosively with water, what about arsenic makes it both a deadly poison and a cure for syphilis, and how mercury inspired the term 'mad as a hatter'.
He's not the only poet to have taken inspiration from the periodic table. There is also this:
...in which I found, from Mark Slaughter:
Elemental
We are but stardust,
forged from fiery furnaces,
trapped within the elements,
bound by cosmic forces
Amongst physicist poets, we can include James Clerk Maxwell who begins a poem with these lines
Both Action and Reaction now are gone.
Just ere they vanished,
Stress joined their hands in peace, and made them one;
then they were banished
There is more of that - and much, much more at this site - from MIT: SCIENCE POETRY
And - perhaps more about the world of education and its occasional fads than about physics - what of this contribution from a regular contributor to this site, Kate Urell?
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