Are Angles Okay? Article: Booknotes Autumn 2006

Imagination is more important than knowledge…
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

You could be forgiven for not knowing that 2005 is the world year of Physics. However a group of creative writers and physicists are working to change that. Physics is about to get poetic.
‘Poetry and Science?’ I hear you say. ‘What have they got in common?’ Well, the answer is: more than you might at first imagine…
All major poets in English ‘from Chaucer onwards, have, in some way been concerned with the science of their day’, according to John Heath-Stubbs and Phillip Salmon (Editors of the Penguin anthology Poems of Science). In the 19th century poetry held a privileged position of cultural importance but science took over this place of cultural authority at the beginning of the 20th century. Much of the last century, since Victorian times, saw a cultural divide between poetry and science, culminating in the famous ‘two cultures’ debate between FR Leavis and CP Snow in 1962.
Despite this divide 20th century poetry had a more complex relationship with science than any other period. From quantum theory and Relativity at the beginning to genetic engineering and the digital revolution at the end, science has been the dominant cultural force of the century and is central to our notions of modernity. Towards the end of the last century the divide between poetry and science began to close.
Nowadays the domestication of technology has helped scientific imagery and vocabulary become part of our daily lives. Few people can explain the workings of a microwave or computer, but these technologies are an increasing part of even poets’ everyday lives. A popular understanding of science has been on the rise, with increased publishing of books by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. As these factors combine it seems inevitable that scientific concepts are increasingly being explored in modern poetry.
The Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST) and Creative New Zealand are recognizing these developments with the $700,000 Smash Palace Fund. Piloted in 2002-2003, the fund has been set up to ‘encourage the convergence between the arts and science as a building block for innovation and creativity.’ It is jointly funded by the MoRST and Creative New Zealand.
One of four new projects currently underway with funding from the Smash Palace Fund is ‘Are Angels Okay?’ The project is headed by Bill Manhire as Creative Director and Paul Callaghan as Science Director.
Professor Bill Manhire is best known as one of New Zealand’s leading poets. He has an international reputation as a teacher of creative writing and as a literary talent-spotter. Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, he is also well-known as an anthologist and as someone who has worked to make poetry more accessible to a broad audience.
Professor Paul Callaghan is Professor of Physical Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. He also heads the multi-university MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. Paul has a regular slot on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning Show to talk about science. He is well-known as an inspiring and powerful science communicator.
‘Are Angels Okay?’ aims to connect ten of New Zealand’s best creative writers together with our top physicists to investigate the rules, symmetries and quantum phenomena that define our Universe. The result will be a unique collection of creative writing - short stories, poems, essays, maybe a comic strip and a story for children, possibly a play about the rules, symmetries and quantum phenomena that define the universe.
Bill and Paul spoke to the writers about their area of interest and matched them with one or more physicists who helped them. The project is not expected to produce literal descriptions of the science, or classroom explanations. They want to encourage imaginative exploration, illumination, and surprise. The writers can take their investigation in any direction they want. How they interpret their findings is entirely up to them.

“Are angels OK?” asked Bill.
“Angels are just fine,” said Paul.

Helen Heath spoke to Bill Manhire, Paul Callaghan and two of the poets involved in the project: Glenn Colqhoun and Chris Price.
Chris Price was editor of the literary journal Landfall for a number of years Her first book of poems, Husk, won the best first book award at the Montana New Zealand book Awards. She currently teaches the poetry workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters and edits the on-line magazine, Turbine. Chris collaborated with Alastair Steyn Ross (a computational physicist) and Moira Steyn Ross (a theoretical physicist) from Waikato University. Alastair models the electrical behaviour of the brain during both general anaesthesia and natural sleep. Moira’s interest lies in the fundamental understanding of cortical processes involved in anaesthesia and natural sleep. At Waikato they gave Chris an EEG, so that she “could in a sense ‘see myself thinking’ - and also hear myself, since the frequencies are also audible.”
Glenn Colquhoun is an immensely popular poet, and the second winner of the $60,000 Prize in Modern Letters. His most recent book of poetry is Playing God, which explores the interconnections of medicine and authority. (Colquhoun is also a doctor, and has worked among small Maori communities in the north of New Zealand.) Glenn collaborated with Tony Signal from Massey University and Matt Visser from Victoria University of Wellington.
Tony Signal is Professor of Physics at Massey University. His research interests are mostly in particle physics, which involves trying to understand the behaviour and structure of the building blocks of the universe: sub-atomic particles. Matt Visser is an applied mathematician and mathematical physicist whose research centers on general relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravity) and quantum physics. Matt and Tony have been ‘translating’ equations for Glenn.

HH:
How do you think the writers and scientists will interact?
BM:
We hope that an understanding and personal connection between the two groups will be established that will have an ongoing influence on both the science and creative communities.
Our physicists will introduce our writers to the amazing contradictions and uncertainties that lie at the heart of quantum mechanics. Einstein himself was unable to accept the implications of his discoveries and even fudged the mathematics to keep the Universe from flying apart.
Our writers will give our physicists (and their readers!) new language, and new ways of imagining and interpreting these phenomena.

HH:
What is one way in which poets and scientists differ?
PC:
Poetry, to me, is about the power of language through its multiplicity of word associations Poetry is therefore able to communicate in a much more complex and subtle way than prose, and in a way in which meaning is individualised, according to the experience and word association of the reader or listener. Science on the other hand tries to pin down meaning, decoupling it as much as possible from individual interpretation.
We scientists are often frustrated poets, who love to use colorful language to label our ideas and theories. This is the means by which misunderstanding occurs. To poets, the word association is the source of the power. To scientists, the words are no more than labels. The real meaning lies in the measurements and in the mathematical language which guides our deepest understanding.
The first thing you have to overcome to be a scientist, is to learn to completely distrust “common sense”. Science enables us to find the deeper meaning (some would say “truth”) which eludes us because of our human frame, the conditioning of our senses due to our prior experience. Poetry, on the other hand, relies on our human frame, our prior conditioning. It is all about the human reference frame. Science must escape this frame.

HH:
The language of science has many unusual metaphors, fresh images and turns of phrase. How can poets produce work that does more than just steal tempting language?
Is second-hand perception legitimate? - How can poets make second-hand material their own?
BM:
The artist is at times a scavenger and sometimes, even, a thief. The artist steals the stuff that is just lying around, and makes something new out of it. Thus the artistic work is full of human experience and evidence, and it is not made of anything original – yet it is selected and arranged in such a way that it is distinctive and fresh. It returns to the community information about itself – information that the community may even have forgotten or discarded. Think of the children in Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry finding their “treasure” in the local rubbish dump. Think of Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Man on the Dump”. Think of the much-quoted T.S. Eliot tag: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
In other words, poems come after the big bang. They can’t compete with it. And their authors can’t compete with God.
CP:
How can poets make second hand material their own work? In the same way that any writer deals with research. I call it the earthworm method of writing: you have to chew your way through an awful lot of dirt and compost, absorbing the energy and nutrients into your own system.
I suppose the question is: how does our understanding of scientific ideas alter our perception of ourselves, the physical world, or the way we relate to it, as opposed to just providing bright shiny metaphors for magpie poets to take back to their nests at random? Last month I attended a lecture by Matt Visser. The first point he made was that ‘relativity’ had become a much-abused concept in the popular imagination. In the world of physics, he took pains to point out, ‘relative’ does not mean ‘arbitrary’, or that ‘anything goes’, and that some things are absolute. He quoted Einstein: ‘It’s important to keep an open mind – just not so open that your brains fall out.’ Poets are language machines, not rocket scientists, but I hope the sceptical physicists will help keep us honest, in the sense of not misrepresenting the implications of their work.
GC:
Every topic has tempting language, there is probably no original language, we steal from everywhere – why not physics? It’s about putting the needle through you and putting the needle me and tying the knot. Poems pick up your voice, language and interests, I might cheat off it but it will cheat off me. Poetry is equally as elegant as science with strong forms and language.

HH:
Poets, no matter how intelligent, cannot learn physics comprehensively over a short period of time. Does that matter and why?
GC:
No. Matt and Tony are my translators of the maths language. I am taking the relationship and using it, dipping into it. I love the concepts, they are not the hardest things, it’s the maths; you need to think in maths.
CP:
Well, we poets are not in a position to match the expertise of our scientific colleagues: but the object of the exercise, as I understand it, is to bridge the gap between the world of the specialist and the world of the layperson, to reflect on some of the scientist’s insights into the world and the way it works in ways the layperson, who is unlikely to read the scientific literature, might find accessible. Poetry and science are different activities with different goals. Newton, for instance, described poetry as ‘ingenious nonsense’, a view with which many contemporary scientists would probably concur! Should poets despair, then, of such a project? I don’t think so. We expect different outcomes from poetic experiments to scientific ones. In poetry it’s permissible to privilege subjective experiences (what the philosophers and neuroscientists like to call ‘qualia’, defined as ‘the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives’) as much as the ‘facts’ upon which we can all agree. Better to look to what poetry and science have in common, which is a sense of wonder at the infinite richness of the physical universe – including our human selves - and a tremendous curiosity about its processes. This is the territory in which poet and scientist might share similar preoccupations, even as our modes of access are quite different. I attended a couple of lectures on the electrical properties of neurons, and was given a quick introduction to Brownian motion, phase transitions, and a number of other ideas which left my head reeling. Rather than beginning with a clearly defined concept, I’m finding my way towards poems by exploring a fairly broad territory. I take the justification for this methodology from Einstein, who apparently once said, ‘If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?’

HH:
William Carlos Williams considered that Einsteinian physics had opened up the way to a new conception of poetic form, as well as space-time. How do you think this collaboration has affected your use of form?
CP:
Because the general territory I’ve been assigned is the physics of creativity, I’m interested in finding a form that will in some way reflect the way the brain (or at least my brain) works. By this I mean laying bare the associative processes that are behind the making of poems, attempting in some way to find a form that will reflect the way memory and imagination behave. I’m pondering a long line and a poetic shape that will accommodate a conversational tone and the sense of a mind exploring a territory in real time, rather than arranging ideas and images into tightly constructed and polished pronouncements. This isn’t new in poetry, but it will be a new approach to form for me.
GC:
Definitely. I am at an early stage of a sequence of 12 poems, which are 12 pivotal equations (one being Pythagoras’ theorem) which I am translating into poems. To be placed, when published, opposite the original equations. Its all about maths rather than words.

HH:
Muriel Rukeyser talks about physicists providing “a language of process…language of the kind of life that is not a point-to-point movement, but a real flow in which everything is seen as deeply related to everything else”. Has this project given you a language of process?
CP:
Since I have been delving into the electro-chemical processes that are at work in our inner world, I am more inclined to see ‘inspiration’, for example, as being rooted as much in the physical realities of the body and brain as in the more nebulous and contested realm of ‘consciousness’. Writers know that the day-to-day business of writing is as much about managing their relationship to their physical and mental processes as it is about the words that finally make it to the page. Do you work best in the morning or at night? Is that first cup of coffee crucial? Are you better off to defer eating as long as possible? Most writers learn how best to drive the car for optimum performance: neuroscience is now giving us a look at the mechanics of what’s happening under the bonnet, and a language with which to describe it.
GC:
I am fascinated by equations, I find them succinct and mysterious and they hold a huge amount of information, at their core is a relationship between 2, 3 maybe 4 things. Equations are sexy. They are a code, which is one of my pleasures in poetry. Maths is a language and mathematical theorems can be translated just like any other language.

HH:
Will the average reader understand or pick up on any references to theories of physics in your work? Does it matter and why?
CP:
Well, that remains to be seen. I don’t want to overload the delicate mechanism of the poem with material it was not designed to carry: too much information can make poems (and fiction) leaden, indigestible. My hope is to produce good poems that don’t contain bad science. What the reader ultimately makes of the poems will depend on them.
GC:
I am hoping people will get a sense of resonance, they don’t have to understand everything. Perhaps they will find something in the rhythm; the music; or an image - and respond.
This is not ‘An Explanation of Physics for my Father’, it is my response to physics. I want to preserve a sense of ‘you have to work to get in’. It the past I’ve written democratic poetry – connecting with people who don’t usually like poems but these new poems are more ‘poetry poems’ there is more of an air of mystery in the poem, matching up with the mysteriousness of physics. They are mostly understandable but they have a few loose ends – deliberately so, the topic lends itself to that.

HH:
When can we expect to see some of the poems?
CP:
They’re at a very early stage of development: you could say they are still a primordial soup right now!
BM:
The book is scheduled for 31 May publication. I think that Radio New Zealand is planning to record some presentations at Te Papa during 14-19 November. Margaret Mahy, Jo Randerson, and Glenn Colquhoun are doing lunchtime events during the science week then and will broadcast them sometime over this summer. Glenn will certainly be reading some of his equation poems. Jo will be doing her theatrical science lecture. We’re expecting there’ll be a range of public appearances about the time the book comes out.
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They’re wrong, the scientists. The universe wasn’t created
billions of years ago.
The universe is created every day.
- Abba Kover, from The Scientists are Wrong

Suggested further reading:
Poems of Science eds John Heath-Stubbs & Phillip Salman, Penguin. (Out of Print)
A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 poems about Science, eds Maurice Riordan & Jon Turney, Faber.