More (un)certainty, or do I mean something else?

Following on from my last blog, the event on poetry and astronomy at Royal Observatory in Greenwich went very well. Jocelyn Bell Burnell gave a great talk and invited members of the audience to read aloud the poems on astronomy she had selected. These readings were fantastic; and I think helped the discussion with the audience to flow more freely.

At one point during this discussion I said that perhaps scientists aim to be more ‘certain’ in their writings than poets, and aim to get a more definite response in their readers. A lady in the audience rightly reminded me that since 1927 physicists have been wrestling with uncertainty, and in particular the uncertainty principle and its implications for reality.

One of the problems with trying to understand the uncertainty principle is the word ‘uncertainty’. It’s a translation from the original German phrase used by Heisenberg when he formulated the physics. But he actually used several German words. It’s a shame that the English equivalent has invariably been ‘uncertainty’ and perhaps we accord that specific word too much weight.

What Heisenberg actually deduced, and what he summarised in this principle, is that not every physical property of a system exists with infinite precision at every point in time. Furthermore, these physical properties are connected; so that the more precise the position of a particle is, the less precise is its momentum.

You often see this explained as due to the practical problems of measurement; if you measure the position of a particle, you use light photons to do this and they will hit the particle, inevitably leading to a change in its momentum. This way of thinking implies that there is an underlying physical certainty, but that we just can’t measure it. It leads to approximately the right mathematical formulation of the principle, but it’s wrong-headed. It’s a metaphor that’s been stretched too far.

The uncertainty principle is telling us something much more fundamental about reality than that. It’s telling us that reality itself has an inexactness; there is nothing beyond what we can measure. There is no underlying, more precise, reality. This can perhaps be better expressed in some of the other words that Heisenberg used, for example; ‘indeterminability’.

So, some of the misunderstandings about this principle derive from the English word ‘uncertainty’, and the fact that this translation of Heisenberg’s original words has become rather too crystallised, perhaps even too ‘certain’. It’s taken on a shorthand meaning of a general vagueness, and even a general limit to scientists’ ambitions about their work.

An additional layer of uncertainty has been added by the requirement to translate Heisenberg’s words from German, and this influences the way we’re able to discuss the subject in English. (It’s obviously more precise to go to the maths, but there was an analogous ‘translation’ problem in the 1920s, when both Heisenberg and Schrödinger came up with very different mathematical formulations for quantum physics. It took some time before they realised that one formulation could be translated into another.)
Is it easier to talk about this principle in the original German? Answers on a postcard, please.

Finally, there will be more actual (as opposed to online) discussions about poetry and science; we’re having a ‘social sessions’ event on 13 January in Edinburgh at the Scottish Poetry Library. Do come!

Dark matter – clear poetry

The Royal Observatory Greenwich is holding a public event on 10 November to discuss poems about astronomy. The astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the poet Kelley Swaine, and I will be speaking at it.

There is a lot of poetry written about astronomy, and I find this surprising for a couple of reasons.

First, because there’s hardly any literary fiction (I’m only singling out literary fiction because, with its emphasis on language, it’s the nearest thing in prose to poetry) inspired by astronomy. There are the wonderful books by John Banville, ‘Copernicus’, and ‘Kepler’, which are fictional accounts of these astronomers’ lives. There is ‘The Discovery of Heaven’ by Harry Mulisch. And that’s it. (Is it? Tell me I’m wrong)

Second, poetry likes to restrict itself in terms of space, and numbers of words. It likes to be concise, condensed. Astronomy, by its very nature, attempts to explain the entire universe. How can there be any sort of dialogue between such a constrained art-form and such a sprawling subject? What can poetry meaningfully say about astronomy?

Looking at the anthology of poetry about astronomy, ‘Dark Matter’, what strikes me is how many of the poems use people to investigate the subject. As I’ve said before in previous blogs we can’t seem to escape the human-sized in literature. So is astronomy just being used as a metaphor for human activities and emotions? Or is it being explored as something interesting in its own right?

Rebecca Elson managed to write very concise poems that convey an accurate sense of the science – her poem ‘Explaining Relativity’ describes how, according to the theory of general relativity, space is distorted by matter, and the way matter moves is correspondingly affected by this distortion.
‘What if There Were No Moon?’ describes how the Moon affects the Earth; not only tides and eclipses, but also human constructions such as the calendar.

Perhaps poetry has similarities to mathematics, in that discipline’s desire to explain and describe as concisely as possible. Euler’s identity is much loved by mathematicians, because it links the fundamental arithmetic operations to irrational, transcendental, and imaginary numbers in one very simple equation. e to the i pi plus one equals zero. When you say it out loud it sounds like poetry.

The pro-am tournament

Science (of all descriptions) is usually done by scientists in universities or industries, and they get paid to do it. Science became a predominantly paid profession towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the growth of lectureships and PhD studies at universities. Until then, amateurs had played a key role. Victorian science is full of country parsons with microscopes in their dining rooms, and even Darwin wasn’t a professional scientist.

Until recently, astronomy was probably the only science still carried out by amateurs as well as professionals. Amateur astronomers do useful stuff like monitor the changes in light from variable stars. They also search the sky for supernovae (exploding stars), and other rare phenomena. They’re in a good position to do so, as they tend to have more access to telescopes (albeit much smaller telescopes than the ones professionals use).

But amateur astronomy is different to that done by professionals. Amateur astronomers have more in common with collectors of butterflies or fossils. In any science there’s a need to collect, classify, and categorise. Before you can explain different phenomena you need to have detailed descriptions of them, know how common they are and where they occur. Is a big red star a different type of star than a small white one? Or just the same type at a different stage of its life?

Amateurs document and describe what they find, but they’re less likely to investigate the underlying physics and provide explanations of what they see. Theirs is a more passive activity than professional astronomy. Perhaps it’s also more visually aesthetic because they spend more time actually looking at the sky.

Now, the edges are being blurred between amateur and professional astronomy as amateurs are able to get access to facilities like the 2 metre robotic Liverpool Telescope. Will this change what they do?

And now astronomy is no longer the only science in which amateurs participate. There is a growing trend for DIY biology, done by amateurs in their kitchens. This is seen by its practitioners as challenging the hegemony of ‘big science’ and making it more democratic so that genetically modified organisms aren’t just created for the purposes of making profit. This sort of amateur science is much more of a challenge to professionals than amateur astronomy. DIY biologists are doing what professionals are doing, just on a smaller scale, and the professional way of ensuring that scientific results meet a commonly agreed standard is through peer review. Will the DIYers bother with that? Perhapd they won’t need to, if they’re not applying for jobs or grants…

Of course, the blurring between amateur and professional activities happens because people get access to technology and information. Writers now publish on the internet. It may not be ‘professional’ and it may not make them any money, but it disseminates their work. But we still crave the kudos that comes from getting our work published in more traditional ways. Do we want this just because it’s so difficult to get?