The Poetry Of Physics Poem by Paul Hartal

Science thrives
absorbed in the myth of objectivity.
The vision of science as rigorous research
based on exact observation
and objective facts is full of holes.

Great scientists have known this for long.
According to the American physicist
Leon Lederman, a Nobel Laureate,
the essence of physics is pure faith:
“To believe something while
knowing that it cannot be proved (yet) .”

Going back in history we find
that the ancient Greek Philosopher Plato
and his pupil, Aristotle, held that symmetry,
order and proportion of form, through
the organic unity of the whole, gave rise
to beauty, expressed in art, poetry
and in the mathematical sciences.

In modern times
the French mathematician and physicist
Henri Poincare (1854-1912) believed that
a common denominator of mathematics
and art lies in the domain of creativity.
He assumed that in mathematics,
an indispensable and exact tool of physics,
the aesthetic faculty working through
imagination, illumination or intuition,
is the dominant trait of creativity.
To logic he assigned only a secondary role.

In 1922 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr said
to his young German colleague,
Werner Heisenberg:
“When it comes to atoms, language
can be used only as in poetry.”
For, “the poet, too, is not nearly
so concerned with describing facts as with
creating images and establishing
mental connections.”

Another Nobel Prize recipient in physics,
the English quantum theorist Paul Dirac
formulated a significant wave equation,
which describes the behaviour
of subatomic particles, electrons
and other fermions. It implied
the existence of antimatter.
The Dirac equation
appeared in the author’s 1928 paper
suggesting that electrons can have
both a positive and negative charge.
Four years later Carl D. Anderson
on a cloud chamber photograph
identified the antimatter counterpart
of the electron, the positron.

Paul Dirac,
the brilliant Lucasian Professor
of Mathematics at Cambridge,
was a precise, taciturn and modest
person. As a theoretician he praised
the beauty of concepts and believed
that their ontological status surpassed
the level of empirical reality.
For his part,
a beautiful mathematical formula
represents truth
even if it is not borne out
by data or experiment.

Yet Dirac has no interest in poetry and
thought it is incompatible with physics.
According to him, science aims to make
difficult things simple and clear,
whereas poetry aims to state
simple things in an incomprehensible way.

On the other hand Albert Einstein,
the greatest scientist of the 20th century,
was also an accomplished musician,
as well as a gifted poet.
“I’m enough of an artist”, he said,
“to draw fully on my imagination,
which I think is more important than
knowledge. Knowledge is limited,
imagination encircles the world.”