Nick Laird in The Guardian on merging science with poetry:

How do you describe things of this size or length of time, this speed or heat? Experience, being broadly empirical, gives us no meaningful terms. What we do have is domestic analogies, and poems that reference outer space tend to tell us more about inner space - ourselves - than anything about the cosmos.

Any description of the deep underpinnings of science is likely to border on poetry or prose. As Laird says, the facts of the universe are so beyond our imagination that analogies are necessary to explain the world in anything but math. Thus any attempt to put the truth in layman’s terms is an attempt at poetry.

Also, Laird reminded me of perhaps my favorite two lines ever put together from the English language:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

(via Alexander Pope)

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