15 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Life is Like a Sonnet
"In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not? …There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm, or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it? …But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn’t he?”
“You mean you’re comparing our lives to ... 1 
notes
notesIt has a strict formula and structure, but it's what you do within the restrictions that is important.
25 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
How Math Books Are Like Poetry Books
If you pick up a textbook on poetry and thumb the pages, you will see poems interspersed between explanations, explanations that English professors will call prose. Prose differs from poetry in that it is a major subcategory of how language is used.
Prose encompasses all the normal uses: novels, texts,
newspapers, magazines, letter writing, and such. But poetry is different! Poetry is a highly charged telescopic (and sometimes rhythmic) use of the English language, which is employed to simul...Folksonomies: mathematics poetry
Folksonomies: mathematics poetry
1 notes
notesAn intermix of algebra/verse and prose explanations.
23 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Science is Poetry
[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into ...
1 Exploration of nature inspires poetry and art.
22 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Science and Poetry are Like Binary Stars
I would liken science and poetry in their natural independence to those binary stars, often different in colour, which Herschel's telescope discovered to revolve round each other. 'There is one light of the sun,' says St. Paul, 'and another of the moon, and another of the stars: star differeth from star in glory.' It is so here. That star or sun, for it is both, with its cold, clear, white light, is SCIENCE: that other, with its gorgeous and ever-shifting hues and magnificent blaze, is POETRY... 1 notes
notesThey exchange ideas and inspire one another.
12 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs
Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain. Geologists can read those symbols.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Composing Poetry is Like Science
A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable. He lives with data that cannot be numbered, and his experiments can be done only once. The information in a poem is, by definition, not reproducible. ... He becomes an equivalent of scientist, in the act of examining and sorting the things popping in [to his head], finding the marks of remote similarity, points of distant relationship, tiny irregularities that indicate that this one...Where nothing is measurable.
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Genes are Like Batons in a Relay Race
Fossil bones and footsteps and ruined homes are the solid facts of history, but the surest hints, the most enduring signs, lie in those miniscule genes. For a moment we protect them with our lives, then like relay runners with a baton, we pass them on to be carried by our descendents. There is a poetry in genetics which is more difficult to discern in broken bomes, and genes are the only unbroken living thread that weaves back and forth through all those boneyards. 1 notes
notesWe protect them and pass them on from generation to generation.
23 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Darwin Believes Part of his Brain has Atrophied
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain that alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered, and if I had to live my life over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for... 1 notes
notesThe part concerned with taste and the humanities, due to his focus on fact and hypothesis.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Science is Performed With the "Passion of Hope"
Here Coleridge was defending the intellectual discipline of science as a force for clarity and good. He then added one of his most inspired perceptions. He thought that science, as a human activity, ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’. Science, like poetry, was not merely ‘progressive’. It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier ... 1 notes
notesIt is inspired by the idea that humanity can improve and create a better world.
See Also: Coleridge to Davy, 1 January 1800, Coleridge Collected Letters, edited by E.L. Griggs, vol 1; and see Treneer, p5814 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Science Cannot be Celebrated With Poetry
The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are, therefore, speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.Because science deals with things and not persons.
