Poetical Science, Anyone?


You’d think that the famous poet, Lord Byron, a playboy to boot, would marry for love. Instead he married Annabella Milbanke in a “rare display of reason over romanticism”, writes Walter Isaacson in Innovators as a way to “pay off his burdensome debts”. The marriage then was doomed from the start (even more due to the wavelength mismatch: his wife was tutored in maths!), and they divorced after the birth of their daughter Ada, later famous as Lady Ada Lovelace, the “software” brain behind Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Ada thus had both poetry and math in her genes, a combo that deeply influenced her approach to computing machines. As I wrote in an earlier blog, she thought a computing machine could “store, manipulate, process and act upon anything that could be expressed in symbols”, not just numbers. She wrote:
“(Such a computing machine) might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity.”
Poetical science: she was indeed (both) her parents’ daughter…

Centuries later, Steve Jobs expressed the same sentiment:
“Technology alone is not enough – that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that makes our heart sing.”
Isaacson says that the “converse to this paean to the humanities” is also true:
“People who love the arts and humanities should endeavor to appreciate the beauties of math and physics, just as Ada did. Otherwise… they will surrender control of that territory (digital-age creativity) to the engineers.”

Couldn’t agree more. But Robert Pirsig made the same point so much better in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, so I’ll just quote him:
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmissions as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

But the asymmetry on this topic is very severe. As Isaacson says:
“(The arts/humanities folks) consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be Philistines, yet they merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, or an integral and differential equation.”
Pirsig agrees:
“About the Buddha that exists independently of analytic thought much has been said – some would say too much, and would question any attempt to add to it. But about the Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction, virtually nothing has been said.”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarOctober 5, 2018 at 8:31 PM

    So simple, yet so profound!

    (I am not heaping praise just like that. Wisdom can be sensed, even if none can say what is it and how it is grasped! I just feel the wisdom of it here, hence praised.)

    -------

    As to the point of the blog, namely "poetical science" as the name succinctly suggests and the blog has zeroed in through quotes flowing smoothly and not in jerks, I wish to add this.

    If you grasp the essence in a still broader perspective, it may boil down to this question: "Why is it, every member of the humankind thinks through one's own bounds?"

    See, one's paradigm is the average mental tendency (call it character, or, the prevailing belief/stand system due to the accumulation of mind's past transnational influences). Religious people think within chosen dogmas, for example. Scientists, we may wrongly imagine, are free from this; not really. They proceed with their belief system, sometimes scientific convictions and all. How can scientific conviction NOT be belief? Any number of science ideas went wrong, implying notions held only for some time.

    The problem therefore is we are unable to "think outside the box", as the cliche goes. Knowing this, we should keep trying, with inner conviction, to overcome our bounded thought process or notions. Easy to say, but difficult to achieve in general.

    One thing is certain: in all domains of knowledge, transcendental ideas only showed direction and greater insights.

    This holds true even for religion - the struggle of every attained saint is that their words to change from wrong old ideas would be stubbornly resisted by faith-clingers. Each prophet showed completely new direction and path to suit their time and environment. The most uphill task, I would imagine. Once their ideas get accepted, it doesn't take long (just a few centuries for example) before their breathtaking points become obsolete dogmas to cling dearly too! :-(

    Having said it all, my conviction is in what the blog says. But I go one step beyond - not just art and science taken together; I want spirituality, art, science to be in homogeneous blend in us. Too tall an order for now, but who can stop anyone from dreaming?!!!

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