Poetic Knowledge: Foundation for Science?

Just thinking out loud, so to speak. I do not claim to fully understand this book as it is my first reading. That said, I found it interesting that scientific knowledge can act as a witness of poetic knowledge. I saw this instance at least twice in the section. Which makes sense as scientific knowledge stems from and has a foundation of poetic knowledge. Maybe that is a way to verify if the science is true by tracing it back to it's poetic source, if there is no poetic source then perhaps truth is lacking?

Example 1

Taylor states, "It was from Socrates, to Aristotle, to Augustine, that we learned there must be present something of the beautiful embedded as a universal in the particular object that gives rise to wonder and delight for there to be poetic experience." He later quotes Umberto Eco thus, "'The soul recognized in material objects a harmony identical with that of its own structure, and this recognition was the genesis of aesthetic pleasure.'"

I had my Thomas Jefferson Education (hereafter TJ Ed) bookclub Friday night last. Don't ask me how the topic went from Plutarch's Lives of Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, Alexander, and Caesar to dinosaurs, Yetti, aliens, truth (no one has the market on truth), and electrons (to name a few of the many subjects discussed) but it did, maybe that's the great thing about classics, eh? They have such broad, yet deep application. Sorry, I digress a bit....

Electrons. One bookclub member brought up some articles he about electrons I found applicable to poetic knowledge. He sent me the articles. From one (sorry, he didn't tell me the title of the book*. I'll have to get that later) it states,

"In 1923 French physicist Louis de Broglie proposed the idea that an electron, like a photon of light, could behave both as a particle and as a wave. This discovery made scientists 'giddy' again. They were used to thinking of nature's objectivity: A flower is a flower; a tree is a tree. In the quantum world, a particle is a particle sometimes and a wave sometimes."

The article goes on to explain the "Two-Slit Experiment" that german physicist Max Born conducted to test the Broglie theory. In it Born sets up three testing areas. Each area consists of a screen with two doors that can be closed with a solid panel behind the screen. Each test "shoots" something at the screen with one door closed, then the other door closed, then both doors open. The first test uses a machine gun shooting bullets, the next water waves, and the third electrons. Born made curve diagrams for each test result. The bullets are like particles and made a pattern one would expect. The water waves resulted in a pattern one would expect too. Now for the interesting part,

"Since electrons are particles, the logical expectation is that they would form a pattern like the bullet pattern. The electrons behaved like particles, like the bullets, going through the slits, but they made a pattern on the screen like the water waves. The switch from particle pattern to wave pattern made no sense.

Born Shone a light behind the slits to see what was going on. When he watched the electron particles with his light, they made a particle pattern like bullets instead of the wave pattern they made when he was not watching. Then he dimmed the light and the pattern began to look like the wave patterns again. His conclusion was that electrons are one way or the other. If anyone sees them they are particles; if no one sees them they are waves. Electrons seem to come into existence as real objects or particles only when someone observes them."

The other article about electrons is found at this site: http://thetheoryofeverythingblog.com/particle-physics/the-electrons-shocking-story/ The relevant material is under the heading: The Electron and Its Shell. This article states,

"The electron pairs in each sublevel do not revolve around the nucleus in a conventional sense...Due to the electrons size and energy level when orbiting the nucleus, the electron is in all of the possible places at once. If we were to freeze-frame the atom, we could only see where the particle is, but would have no indication of speed or direction. In short, the electron in motion is a wave of possibilities all at once, until we observe it, rendering it a stationary particle but never both at once."

This made me think of Toy Story and how the toys play on their own when no one is looking and freeze in place when people are around. So the toys are like electron waves when unseen and like electron particles when seen.

How does this tie in to poetic knowledge? The poetic source in these articles are the scientists themselves and their love for what they are researching. It is only through them and their attention that the electrons come into being so to speak. They are the "something beautiful" giving "rise to wonder and delight" in the experiment experience. It is through them that, "the soul recognized" the electrons thus causing them to be "material objects...and this recognition was the genesis of aesthetic pleasure."

Just a thought...I could be wrong...I'm sure this has all come out as incoherent babble...

Okay, this is too long as it is. My next example will have to be in another post I'll do later this week.

*Shoot me an email if you want to read this paper. becky_teacher@yahoo.com

See other posts on this book: http://www.pelennorfields.com/mystie/2011/poetic-knowledge-book-club-chapter-2-part-2-the-philosophical-foundations/