The image of science is often that of a world hostile to poetry, with nothing in common with the literary landscape, with its colourful images, metaphors and myths. There’s nothing new in this feeling, Thomas Sprat, writing the early history of the Royal Society in 1667, declared that the aim of the Society was:` to separate the knowledge of Nature from the colours of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables.’ It does seem reasonable for scientists to distinguish between the common lizard and the heraldic dragon, but this aim can also be seen as dividing science, the knowledge of Nature, from poetry with its fancy and fables.

John Keats certainly felt that the scientific approach was hostile to poets. Referring to the work of Newton on light, Keats wrote, in Lamia Part II, of his fear that science would ‘Conquer all mysteries by rule and line ... Unweave a rainbow. However not all poets were averse to weaving the new knowledge on light into their poems. Alexander Pope wrote an enthusiastic poem declaring that 'Newton demands the Muse' .

But there was reason for Keats’ distrustful attitude. Some of the early scientists, particularly Francis Bacon, spoke in terms of conquering and enslaving Nature. This arrogant attitude was at odds with the reverence for nature felt by the Romantic poets. The schism between science and literature widened over the years, fed in part by power struggles in academic world. C P Snow famously deplored it in his Rede lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ in 1959. There is still a distrust of science today, sometimes based on ignorance, sometimes on the reasonable fear of the consequences of scientific progress unchecked by ethical consideration of its effects. There is also an antipathy to the bleak but sensational metaphors of reductionist scientists which refer to humans as survival machines and robot vehicles. Sometimes scientific predictions based on insufficient evidence are put forward as certain knowledge, and then proved to be wrong, which leads people to 'lose faith' in scientists.

Science in Victorian times was often portrayed by its advocates, T H Huxley in particular, as certain knowledge, with the emphasis on the collection of dry facts. Mystery, excitement and imagination appeared to have no part in science. But in the twentieth century eminent scientists, for example the physicist Richard Feynman, the immunologist Peter Medawar, both Nobel Prize winners, and Steve Jones, a geneticist and contemporary science writer, emphasise in their writings that scientific discoveries are always uncertain and incomplete, that mysteries remain, that science is always ambiguous and often controversial, and that imagination is required to solve scientific problems. And when Professor Stephen Hawking says that there’s nothing quite like the Eureka moment of discovering something that no one knew before, this seems to me to echo the Eureka moment when a poem or story, at first almost invisible in the distance, suddenly becomes clear and takes shape.

Reading these authors, the distance between poetry and science seems to shrink. When Medawar writes about building explanatory structures, telling stories and testing them to see if they are stories about real life, this seems to me to echo what poets are also attempting to do.

If poets are to write about science how should it be done? Wordsworth, an admirer of Newton, considered that thought as well as feeling should be part of poetry, but was aware that technical information did not easily translate into poetry. He wrote:

'The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist or Mineralogist will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any on which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us ... manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.'

The effects of science do now permeate every part of our life, our culture and our awareness of the world around us: television, mobile phones, industrialised agriculture, modern medicine, machine guns and smart bombs, trains, cars and aeroplanes have altered the way we live and the way we see the world. The use of scientific knowledge is one of the most important issues to face us at the moment, considerable ethical questions arise from the science of genetics, of communication and surveillance, and of so many aspects of the way we live now.

But in spite of its increasing importance to our lives poets have not engaged very much with science. Perhaps some of them felt as W H Auden did when he wrote in 'The Dyers Hand, Poet and the City (1963)' that poetry could not celebrate scientists, because they are concerned with things, not persons, and, perhaps more to the point, he confessed that in a gathering of scientists he felt like a shabby curate in the company of dukes.

What is science anyway? How does it work? Is there a special scientific method? In the 1960's scientists looked at these questions, and did not always answer them in the way that might have been expected. Medawar wrote an essay, ‘Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?’ which suggested that the way that scientists presented their results did not reflect the way that science was done, but how it was supposed to be done, and Thomas Kuhn wrote his controversial but influential book, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', which argued that science is not a steady acquisition of knowledge, but is punctuated by revolutions, in which the tradition bound activity of normal science is shattered, and one conceptual world is replaced by another. He also questioned whether it was useful to think that there was one full, objective and true explanation of the processes of nature. Sociologists, philosophers and historians of science debate the question: is science an entity at all? Is it reasonable to incorporate under one term such disparate enterprises as for instance nuclear physics, the study of fossils, plant physiology and the social systems of ants. The sociology of scientific knowledge looks at the history and practice of science in a very radical way. Its proponents, among them Steve Woolgar and Steve Fuller, consider that many beliefs about science, such as that it is a unified discipline that has made steady progress, that it is objective and that its search for truth is unsullied by self interest or cultural and social pressures, do not stand up to critical examination.

Science, however it is defined or deconstructed, is as full of controversy as the literary world. It also contains stories, metaphors, ambiguities and a plethora of extraordinary images from unusual viewpoints.

Attempts to bridge the divide between poetry and science been made, some useful, some disastrous. The ones which are worse than useless are based not on an effort to understand the other persons point of view, but on an attempt to impose the writer's own dogmatic certainty on others . Science writer Richard Dawkins, in his book ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’, tries to persuade the reader that scientific knowledge is more exciting than myths, rhapsodises on the physics of rainbows, and then suggests that Wordsworth’s poem which begins, My heart leaps up when I behold / a rainbow in the sky, would have been better if the poet had known and used the fascinating scientific details of how rainbows are produced.

This idea amused me but I was still thinking about it as I walked up the street early one January evening and saw the new moon. It was a sliver of light low in a dark blue sky above the dull orange remains of the sunset. As I walked along the image appeared and then disappeared behind the bulk of the semi-detached houses. The moon in the clear sky appeared fragile, the points of the crescent wonderfully, almost painfully sharp. This piercing, ephemeral but unforgettable experience is a rare thing, mostly the solid images of everyday life get in the way. Wordsworth wrote about the effects of this experience of heightened perception in the Prelude, Chapter XII

there are in our experience spots of time
that with distinct pre-eminence retain
a renovating virtue

If Richard Dawkins had been there he might have pointed out that the image that so impressed me in that spot of time was of course an illusion, the moon is not a fragile, ephemeral crescent of light, and he would have enlightened me on all the facts known about the moon. But there seemed to me no point in simply versifying the present scientific understanding of the moon as a physical object, and yet it also seemed unsatisfactory to write a poem which ignores the modern vision of the moon. Science has taken men to the moon where they experienced the piercing shock of seeing the earth rising in space. Thanks to the science of photography, in a spot of time the fragile blue globe was photographed from the moon. This amazing image of earth seen from an unfamiliar standpoint remains in the collective memory of our culture as an important modern icon.  It seems to me that the visions and images generated by science, as distinct from the nuts and bolts of science, are part of the mental landscape which is viewed by our Wordsworthian 'inward eye', so that they are poetic as well as scientific images. Another way of looking at the same idea is to see that it is meaningless to categorize images, in the mind images do not appear with labels, they are simply images. The image of science is just that, an image, an attempt to reflect the world outside ourselves that we label reality; but science, like all our other attempts to reflect reality, can never give us the full picture. I explored these ideas in the poem 'Space with Wordsworth'.

Space with Wordsworth

A sliver of moon
faintly marks the deep blue space,
between the houses,
above the misty orange after-burn
of winter sun

I walk through the cold
sometimes the solid semis intercept
the fragile moon,
sometimes its scimitar points 
pierce through the gaps

Wordsworth arrives
he takes my arm and we turn to face
the ephemeral moon;
he talks of enduring images that rise
from spots of time

An astronaut comes by
and dazzles our minds with his first lunar dawn;
a moment so sharp
his heart was transfixed by the faint blue earth
rising in space.

Wordsworth knows nothing
of science that blasted men free from the pull
of our planet,
that captured moon vision for millions of eyes
in a spot of time.

But even in the dark
the poet can see how reflections connect,
how my inward eye
holds the moon between ephemeral houses
and Gaia in space.

Anne Bryan

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