Quantum Physics for Poets

Dick Kovar, Sean J. O'Reilly, William V. Medlin

Brian Clegg

My immediate response to the title of Quantum Physics for Poets is "I am not worthy." Although I have written a couple of limericks and a particularly dire sonnet, I am hardly a poet. Luckily, the book's target audience is not actually so limited.

Peter J. Lewis

Robert L. Nadeau, Menas C. Kafatos

Abstract The worldview of classical physics allowed the physicist to assume that communion with the essences of physical reality via mathematical laws and associated theories was possible, but it made no other provisions for the knowing mind. In our new situation, the status of the knowing mind seems quite different. All of modern physics contributes to a view of the universe as an unbroken, undissectible, and undivided dynamic whole. “There can hardly be a sharper contrast;’ said Melic Capek, “than that between the everlasting atoms of classical physics and the vanishing ‘particles’ of modern physics.”

J. Lowell

Last year was the centenary of T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most influential of 20th-century poets writing in English. That Eliot pursued careers in publishing and banking in addition to his literary work is widely known, but many of his readers will be astonished to learn of the discovery last year of manuscripts that suggest he might at one time have been a student of physics. Published here for the first time, the poems are strongly influenced by the quantum theory that was growing vigorously when Eliot was a young man. They exhibit unmistakable echoes of “The Waste Land,” “Four Quartets” and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. (They also show remarkable physical prescience: Several of the ideas hinted at postdate Eliot's death in 1965.)

Bénédicte Letellier