In his book Einstein, History, and other Passions, Gerald Holton describes the influence of science on our culture. The dilemma of the poet is that he or she may not fully understand or appreciate those aspects of science they wish to incorporate into their art.
"If the poet neither settles for the relief of half-understood analogies nor can advance to an honest understanding of the rational structure of that modern world picture, and if he is sufficiently sensitive to this impotency, he must rage against what is left him. ... At best, ... this rage itself creates the energy needed for a grand fusion of the literary imagination with perhaps only dimly perceived scientific ideas. There are writers and artists of such inherent power that the ideas of science they may be using are dissolved, like all other externals, and rearranged in their own glowing alchemical cauldron."
"It should not, after all, surprise us; it has always happened this way. Dante and Milton did not use the cosmological ideas of their time as tools to demarcate the allowed outline or content of their imaginative constructs. Those students of ours who, year after year, write dutifully more or less the same essay, explaining the structure of the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost by means of astronomy, geography, and the theory of optical phenomena -- they may get the small points right, but they miss the big one, which is that the good poet is a poet surely because he can transcend rather than triangulate. In Faulkner, in Eliot's The Waste Land, in Woolf's The Waves, in Mann's Magic Mountain it is futile to judge whether the traces of modern physics are good physics or bad, for these trace elements have been used in the making of a new alloy. It is one way to understanding Faulkner's remark on accepting his Nobel Prize in 1950: the task was 'to make out of the material of the human spirit something which was not there before.' And insofar as an author fails to produce the feat of recrystallization, I suspect this lack would not be cured by more lessons on Minkowski's space-time, or Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, or even thermodynamics, although these lessons could occasionally have a prophylactic effect that might not be without value."
"Here we suddenly remember that, of course, the very same thing is true for scientists themselves. The most creative ones, almost by definition, do not build their constructs patiently by assembling blocks that have been precast by others and certified as sound. On the contrary, they too melt down the ready-made materials of science and recast them in a way that their contemporaries tend to think is outrageous. That is why Einstein's own work took so long to be appreciated even by his best fellow physicists.... His physics looked to them like alchemy, not because they did not understand it at all, but because, in one sense, they understood it all too well. From their thematic perspective, Einstein's was anathema. Declaring, by simple postulation rather than by proof, Galilean relativity to be extended from mechanics to optics and all other branches of physics; dismissing the ether, the playground of most nineteenth-century physicists, in a preemptory half-sentence; depriving time intervals of inherent meaning; and other such outrages, all delivered in a casual, confident way in the first, short paper on relativity -- those were violent and 'illegitimate' distortions of science to almost every physicist. As for Einstein's new ideas on the quantum physics of light emission, Max Planck felt so embarrassed by it when he had to write Einstein a letter of recommendation seven years later that he asked that this work be overlooked in judging the otherwise promising young man." "We perceive ... examples of creative transformation beyond science. Those are the works of the few who found that scientific ideas, or rather metaphors embodying such ideas, released in them a fruitful response with an authenticity of its own, far removed from textbook physics."
"This last is the oldest and surely still the most puzzling interplay between science and the rest of culture. Evidently, the mediation occurs through a sharing of an analogy or metaphor -- irresistible, despite the dangers inherent in the obvious differences or discontinuities. We know that such a process exists, because any major work of science itself, in its nascent phase, is connected analogically rather than fully logically, both with the historic past in that science and with its supporting data. The scientist's proposal may fit the facts of nature as a glove fits a hand, but the glove does not uniquely imply the hand, nor the hand the glove."
"Einstein spoke insistently over the decades about the need to recognize the existence of such a discontinuity; one that in his early scientific papers asserted itself first in his audacious method of postulation. In essay after essay, he tried to make the same point, even though it had little effect of the then reigning positivism. Typical are the phrases in his Herbert Spencer Lecture of 1933. The rational and empirical components of human knowledge stand in 'eternal antithesis,' for 'propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality.' In this sense, the 'fundamentals of scientific theory,' being initially free inventions of the human mind, are of 'purely fictional character.' The phenomenic-analytic dichotomy makes it inherently impossible to claim that the principles of a theory are 'deduced from experience' by 'abstraction,' that is, by logically complete claims of argument."
- quoted from Gerald Holton, "Einstein's Influence on our Culture," in Einstein, History, and Other Passions, AIP Press, 1995
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