Music And Science Poem by gershon hepner

MUSIC AND SCIENCE

Thomas Eisner said he wouldn't rust
a scientist who was not also a musician,
thinking musically no less a must
for scientists than oil paint is for any Titian.

All science deals with harmony. As coats
of paint enabled Titian to achieve his ends,
so evidence in scientific notes
reveals the harmony on which all life depends.

Natalie Angier writes about Thomas Eisner ("Paths of Discovery, lighted by a Bug Man's Insights, " NYT Science Times,4/5/11) :
About three months ago, Thomas Eisner of Cornell University, a towering figure in the fields of biology, ecology and evolution, and a promoter of the class Insecta and related arthropod throngs so thermodynamically persuasive you kept expecting a pair of antennae to sprout from his forehead, sent my 14-year-old daughter, Katherine, a wonderful, miserable gift.
Inside were Dr. Eisner's old burlap field bag, with his name written on the flap, collecting jars, precision tweezers, toothpicks, dissecting tools; and several of his prized entomology books, including the first one he ever owned, a butterfly guide that his parents gave him for his 12th birthday, back in 1942.
Katherine was thrilled by the acknowledgement that Dr. Eisner considered her a protégée, somebody who spent more time than Yogi Berra crouched in the dirt, hunting for bugs, and who was graced with the Eisnerian power of what May Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, called "nature vision, " which is like Superman's X-ray vision, but for the details of nature that most people miss. Yes, what a wonderful gift.
Except his personal field bag? His first insect book? People who divest themselves of their closest possessions are people who are ready to die. And though we knew he'd been suffering from Parkinson's for more than a decade, neither we nor his battalions of friends, colleagues and former students around the world, nor the scientific community as a whole, were ready to see him go. Return to sender! What a miserable gift.
Dr. Eisner died from complications of his disease on March 25, at the age of 81. He had a notoriously mordant sense of humor: "I may not believe in God, " he once said, "but I don't ring doorbells saying I'm a Seventh-Day Atheist, " and when asked his opinion of assisted suicide he said he hadn't decided yet because he was "still working on assisted homicide." So I like to think that, in some invitingly spider-webbed corner of his mind he died in Gary Larson-Grand Guignol style: on his back, with all appendages curled up in the air….
His lectures at Cornell were standing room only. He disliked flying and rarely went anywhere he couldn't reach by car, train or, if need be, boat. He was a superb photographer and classical pianist, and he said he had trouble trusting scientists who weren't musicians.
His old friend Roger Payne, the whale researcher and a cellist, understands the sentiment. "Unless you look at the world through a different set of glasses than you normally do, " he said, "you haven't seen it from any but one view." Dr. Eisner's nature vision was the ultimate pansensory superpower: visual, aural, tactile, chemical, and almost too big to hold.

11/5/12 #11588