Reflections on "After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics"

After Reading a Child's
Guide to Modern Physics (1961)

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths — but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.

by W.H. Auden (born 21 February 1907),
[Listen to this poem]

When I chose to write about this poem to mark what would have been W.H. Auden's 100th birthday last month I did not realize that it would also be time for Chinese New Year celebrations. What does this poem have to do with CNY? Only a tedious link to the moment where I was at the table with my friends of various races, including three bachelor 'uncles' three times my age, when my phone's calendar reminded me: 'Auden 100'. I thought about this poem and wondered: what is the universe doing?

Then the moment was lost amongst the clacking of the mahjong tiles.

I haven't read much of Auden's work, and this poem is only one of four (out of maybe a dozen) that I have read and liked— I chose this poem because it gives me a chance to write about poets and scientists. There is a story I read involving the celebrated physicist Richard "The Great Explainer" Feynman (wiki page) and his response to Auden's "After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics".

The long and the short of it, Feynman once challenged poets to be more scientific, saying:

"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! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

One of Feynman's many correspondents then sent him Auden's poem, to which Feynman responded: "Mr. Auden’s poem only confirms his lack of response to Nature’s wonders for he himself says that he would like to know more clearly what we ‘want the knowledge for.’ We want it so we can love Nature more. Would you not turn a beautiful flower around in your hand to see it from other directions as well?"

In a later passage Feynman wrote:

"Nature's ways in the animate and inanimate world, together (for they are one), is rarely expressed in modern poetry where the aspect of Nature being appreciated is one which could have been known to men in the Renaissance [...] My lament was that a kind of intense beauty that I see given to me by science, is seen by so few others; by few poets and, therefore, by even fewer ordinary people."

Consider: at that moment when I wondered what the universe was doing as I played mahjong, skywatchers were looking underneath the red star of Antares in the constellation of Scorpio for a glimpse of 'Nova Scorpii 2007'. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago somewhere in the depths of space accreted matter on a white dwarf star ignited in a runaway thermonuclear reaction, ejecting matter into space at speeds of about 600km/s. This awesome event appears to us now as a faint point of light in the southern sky. In the celebrations this would have gone unnoticed—just another firework in the distance.

Meanwhile, unseen but part of the light radiation that is arriving to Earth are elementary particles called neutrinos ("the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being," described the neutrino's co-discoverer Fred Reines in 1956)—a product of the thermonuclear reactions happening in the star. Hundreds of meters underground, in installations known as solar neutrino detectors (e.g. Japan's Super-Kamiokande) some of these neutrinos collide with the protons and neutrons in water molecule, releasing an electron—in the pitch darkness these gargantuan reservoirs of water twinkle with blue light, and from this scientists can learn a little bit more about the world.

Cosmological Models of the Universe

While all this happens the universe is expanding; 'an ever expanding saddle' was just one of the models of the universe that scientists had when Auden wrote the poem. We know now, however, that the universe is geometrically flat. This was published in the journal Science on 5th January 2007:

"On the whole, it is spatially flat and 13.7 billion years old, both of which are known to 1 percent precision; it is expanding at a rate of 70 plus/minus 2 km/sec per megaparsec, and the expansion us speeding up; and it is composed of 24 plus/minus 4 percent matter and 76 plus or minus 4 percent dark energy, with 4.2 plus/minus 0.5 percent of the matter in the form of atoms, between 0.1 and 1 percent in the form of neutrinos, and with the bulk of the matter dark and as yet unidentified. Stars...account for less than 1 percent of the total composition. The microwave background temperature has been measured to four significant figures, 2.725 plus/minus 0.001 K, and its tiny variations (about 0.001 percent) across the sky have been mapped with a resolution better than 0.1 degree."

—and (now that Auden's piece is obsolete!) who is the poet who will put that in words that will fire the imagination?