Feynman on Poetry
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one – million – year – old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
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In the Dark 
July 6, 2011 at 2:29 pm
It’s an unfair criticism that science takes away from the beauty of the stars; science and poetry are two very different disciplines. Even very general scientific language doesn’t lend itself to poetry, and is often the very antithesis of it. Poetry is about metaphor, analogy, symbolism and personification and while the use of language should be precise, the best poetry is often ambiguous in its meaning. Science doesn’t detract from poetry because it hardly ever encroaches into the same domain. In fact the inverse of the original premise would be that poetry befuddles scientific description, but no scientist would be arrogant enough to put forward this argument.
July 6, 2011 at 4:02 pm
I don’t know about that. I believe Dirac said that the aim of science was to express complicated things simply, whereas poetry…
July 6, 2011 at 4:31 pm
… yeah, that was exactly my point. Poetry is elaborate, imaginary. Science is simple and exact, and therefore isn’t particularly amenable to poetic fancy.
October 10, 2017 at 5:34 am
What’s an unfair criticism is that poets and artists say science takes away from beauty. Any poet or artist who says that (citation needed, btw), is no poet or artist I’d admire.
October 10, 2017 at 6:07 am
Walt Whitman? W.B. Yeats?
July 7, 2011 at 9:26 am
The passage quoted is poetry. Beautiful, evocative, full of imagery and metaphor. Thank you Peter for posting it. I read it after hearing about the possible cancellation of JWST, a project that will, undoubtedly, lead us to know a lot more about stars. But will still not ‘harm the mystery’
Mon
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October 10, 2017 at 5:31 am
I see Feynman often build straw man arguments against poets and artists as if it’s not actually the other way around: It is he who has it in for them, not them who have it in for science. In point of fact, poets and artists are science’s gleam.
April 1, 2018 at 7:02 am
[…] Physicist Richard Feynman decried the idea that there must be a separation between science and poetry, between the empirical and the symbolic. They both reveal truth; just in a different way. Feynman contended: […]