The Feynman Challenge

By James Thornton

A poetry collection that leads the reader into the wonders of scientific discovery and the intricacies of the natural world.

The collection’s title? Richard Feynman, the 20th Century’s most dashing physicist, set poets a challenge: Science is not just mystery but truth, and they should tackle it. From the mating of sea slugs to the discovery of gravity waves, The Feynman Challenge sees James Thornton focus poetry on the realms of science and environment. Poems are sourced with the scientific articles and papers whose narratives and wonders they explore, to help readers whose interest is spiked to travel further. The collection opens with James’s essay that examines the interplay of science, poetry and the natural world, from Lucretius to now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbican Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781909954762

James Thornton

James Thornton is an environmental lawyer and writer. He is the founding CEO of ClientEarth, a not-for-profit environmental-law organisation with offices in London, Brussels, and Warsaw. The New Statesman named James as one of ten people who could change the world. He is a member of the bars of New York, California, and the Supreme Court of the United States, and a solicitor of England and Wales.

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Acknowledgements

This collection was edited by Nigel McLoughlin, poet, Professor of Creativity & Poetics at the University of Gloucestershire, and editor of the literary journal Iota. He also brings a scientist’s eye, with a master’s degree in neuropsychology. My text has benefited from his attention.

I have worked to get the science right. Five senior scientists have helped vet the science.

They are: Howard Covington, physicist and mathematician, Chair of the Alan Turing Institute; Eberhard Fetz, Professor of Physiology & Biophysics, University of Washington; Richard Fortey, palaeontologist, formerly of the Natural History Museum in London; Peter Landrock, cryptographer and mathematician, member of Microsoft’s Technical Advisory Board, and founder of Cryptomathic; and Edward O. Wilson, sociobiologist, entomologist, and evolutionary theorist, University Professor Emeritus, Harvard University.

I am indebted to them. Where they found problems I have turned my pencil around and used the eraser. I own any remaining errors.

Finally thanks to Martin Goodman and Peter Thornton, whose readings and suggestions pushed me back to the page.

Contents

Introduction

Census of deep life

Embodied semantics

Of mice and scorpions

Rumination and forest bathing

A dozen ways to make a living

The future of clouds

The jaguar sometimes bites

Symbiont real estate

Páramos

The apex predator guild

Your inner fish

Tomb blossoms

Long ago and under water

Traumatic matings

Quartet with parasites

The dead fish of Chad

The lodger

Like milkshakes

Hungry daughters

The rolling of the dungball

Head of glass

Fringed with teeth

E.O. Wilson’s favourite ant

Eminent Britons

Aerial wars

Penis Envy

The news about Neanderthals

Conquering Earth

A century of gorging

A bulletin from our branch

Warm wet and quantum

New equilibria

The rules of loss

Spat

Chiropterans

Count those lost

Coelacanths among us

Q is for cryptography

Ringdown

The end of time

Too few to fill the sky

Never forget red dwarfs

The biggest star

Cosmonautika

A time will come

By grace of the solar wind

A map of peculiar velocities

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Starlight Night

Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.

Carlo Rovelli

Reality Is Not What It Seems:

The Journey to Quantum Gravity

‌

Introduction

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Richard Feynman‌

¹

When I first read Feynman’s remarks on poetry, I received them as a challenge. I will write those poems, I said to myself. Thus this collection was born, slowly. What I thought to finish in a year has taken five. Really it all started for me a long time ago.

As a teenager I loved the pre-Socratics, the Greek philosophers who preceded the Athenian contrarian. It is hard not to fall for these thinkers, emerging from the darkness with speculations that seem simulacra of modern theories.

Xenophenes saw seashell fossils on a mountain and deduced that the mountain once lay under the sea. Isn’t that wonderful more than 2000 years before Lyell laid down the principles of geology? What are more beguiling than Zeno’s paradoxes, which demonstrate that motion is not possible? Perhaps most striking is the atomic theory of Democritus.

Only fragments of Democritus’ work remain. This is a shame because he wrote voluminously on philosophy, sense perception, mathematics, and a variety of scientific subjects. But his vision is captured by Lucretius in the great poem De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things.

The atomists created what seems a strikingly modern view, given it emerged in 5th Century bc Greece. They denied that supernatural agency has anything to do with the world. Instead, the world emerged out of an original chaos, in which atoms floated free. As the atoms cohered, gradually a world and living things formed. Atoms are irreducible, of many kinds, and their coming together in mixtures produces the different things we experience. Between atoms is void, with more empty space between atoms of air than atoms of iron.

We sense things, say the atomists, when our sense organs encounter atoms. Because our organs differ somewhat between people, and greatly between people and animals, people perceive the same objects or events differently, and people and animals greatly so. Only reason, operating on the data of the senses, can perceive cause and effect, which rule how atoms combine and all things occur.

The atomists had what looks like an early theory of evolution too. Living things spontaneously adapt to changing circumstances, and people changed from an early pre-linguistic form into us by banding together into tribal units and learning new behaviours.

Democritus opened a new world. It must have felt wonderful to do this work. Four centuries on, Lucretius immortalized it. De Rerum Natura is his only surviving poem and we are lucky to have it. Lucretius has always been in the pantheon of poets, praised in