Physics and poetry revisited

In his April 2022 editorial (page 8 ), Charles Day opens with a quote from Paul Dirac: “The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.” As a poet with a bachelor’s in applied math, I find Dirac’s comment to be clever but misguided.

Doubtless many poets would say that physics makes the simple incomprehensible. Comprehension is a function of training, and mathematical formulation remains baffling to many. Meanwhile, we should always be suspicious of the Dunning–Kruger effect when judging others’ fields as dealing with especially simple matters, particularly when we can see that we do not understand the results.

Poets have diverse aims, not primarily obfuscatory. Some poets explore the limits of language, seeking to say that which is unsayable in everyday speech—a task tackled elegantly by quantum formalism in a domain for which our vernacular has not evolved. The very syntax of human language obscures fundamental understanding of the “really real world” beyond the prosaic and the mesoscale.

Dirac was 13 years old when the poet Hugo Ball presented his “Dada Manifesto” (1916) in pursuit of “poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language.” Such “experimental poetry” may reveal aspects of how language functions or how the brain constructs meaning. Poetic diction may be deliberately dissociated from lyric expression to examine language distinct from confounding factors of sentiment (see, for example, the Language poets of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bernadette Mayer).

Incomprehensible? Yes, often. But it misses the mark to say that the simple has been made so. Poetry is a kind of laboratory environment where language can be brought to exhibit all sorts of odd behaviors that won’t occur in plain prose. The process may appear bizarre, and the results ambiguous. Surely a physicist can relate.