What according to the poet has not been explained by science?
Answers
Explanation:
. Two char
ges e
ach of 6 Coulomb are
15cm apart
from each other in air.
Calculate Co
ulom
b's force
acting between them
This is the kind of comment we expect from a poet on a scientist. Poets generally seem to be unsympathetic to science; they question its capacity to tell us the full truth about our world. Typically, poets claim that science offers us only abstractions, and destroys the living phenomena it purports to study in the very process of analyzing them into their separate (and hence lifeless) parts. As William Wordsworth famously put it: “We murder to dissect.”
Accordingly, the scientist and the poet seem to us to be perpetually at odds. To the poet, the scientist seems unimaginative and literal-minded — with his head buried in the ground of facts, incapable of comprehending the larger significance of what he does. To the scientist, the poet seems to have his head up in the clouds, indulging in fantastic visions of what might be and losing sight of the way things really are. It is difficult for us to imagine a successful conversation between a scientist and a poet — they seem almost to speak different languages.
But before positing an unbridgeable gulf between science and poetry, it is well to remember that the great poet Goethe was also a scientist. He is of course best remembered for his imaginative works, such as Wilhelm Meister and Faust, but his contributions to science were not insignificant. Among other things, he was an accomplished botanist, he helped found the field of comparative anatomy, he coined the term morphology, and he anticipated the theory of evolution. If these achievements do not sound enough like “hard science,” it is well to remember that in 1784 Goethe discovered the intermaxillary bone in the human jaw, thus supplying a link to primate anatomy that proved crucial to later evolutionary theories. Goethe is an exception in many respects, and thus his ability to combine the talents of a poet and a scientist does not tell us much about the general run of poets, but it does at least offer evidence that science and poetry are not utterly incompatible. One might think of other examples, such as the twentieth-century American poet William Carlos Williams, who earned his living as a practicing physician. To open up a dialogue between science and poetry, we do not have to show that the two fields are completely in tune — only that they have at least been in touch. And given the possibility that poets might have something to teach scientists, it is worth looking back at the history of their interaction to see if they have enough in common to be able to speak to each other.