The Similarities between Poetry and Science

Last week Mala Radhakrishnan came to our class to teach us a bit of chemistry and introduce us to “chemistry poetry”. Mala explained that she first came upon this intersection between chemistry and poetry when she was coming up with creative stories to uniquely explain concepts to her high school chemistry class. On a similar note, in “Genomics, Cellomics and… Poetryomics?”, one of the articles for this week, Robery Deyes writes about The Human Genre Project. This project’s goal is to collect works from the public to create an educational resource used to artistically teach people about the human genome. In this article I learned that over recent years poetry has caught the eye of those interested in using new and accessible modes for teaching scientific concepts.
Intrigued, I decided to do a bit of my own research on “scientific poetry” and I came upon a very relevant article, “The science of poetry, the poetry of science” : http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/09/ruth-padel-science-poetry . In this piece Ruth Padel writes about the relationship between poetry and science, and argues, against critics, that the two surprisingly have a lot in common. Padel writes that “science was born in poetry”. She explains that poetry was the earliest written mode through which humans pondered what the world was made of and how it was created; both science and poetry unveil “the secrets of nature”. Padel explains that science and poetry are both dependent on metaphor. She goes even further to claim that both “get at a universal insight or law through the particular”. Finally, Padel introduces the idea that both poetry and science “can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they’re right. True, perhaps. Or just truer”. This last similarity I found to be quite interesting and crucial to the pairing of science and poetry.