The physicist Paul Dirac is said to have been bewildered that his colleague, the father of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, could write poetry while also studying physics. “In science,” he said, “one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite!”
We might half agree with Dirac. Science uncovers new, often counter-intuitive facts, while as Peter Watson puts it in his new book The Age of Nothing: How we have sought to live since the death of God, literature and poetry “clarify … thoughts we have almost had, that we wish we had had.”
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