The Romantic period (roughly 1770-1830) was better represented by poetry than by science. On the poetic side, you had Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, and more. On the science side, you had Michael Faraday, William Herschel, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin; no slouches, to be sure, but you wouldn’t pick out this period as one of the golden ages of science.
But the interesting thing about this era, according to Richard Holmes’s new book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, is that the scientists and the poets were deeply interested in each others’ work. That’s what I gather, anyway — not having read the book yet myself — from Freeman Dyson’s review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a provocative look into the cultural mindset of another time, when the power of science to discover new things about the world wasn’t yet quite taken for granted. Dyson quotes a stanza from Byron’s Don Juan:
This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions;
Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,
Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles,
Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.
Scientists and poets don’t talk to each other as much any more (although there are exceptions). I tend to lament the fact that science doesn’t mingle more comfortably with other kinds of cultural currents of our time. Maybe it’s just not possible — we’ve become too specialized, leaving no room for a writer like Coleridge to proclaim “I shall attack Chemistry like a Shark.” But the more we scientists take seriously to share our ideas with the wider world, the more those ideas will take root.
And some of those poets also did science and wrote about science, while some of those scientists wrote their treateses in verse. Being a scientist AND being a poet (aka, being a philosopher) – those were things that the educated elites did at that time, I guess. It was still possible to do everything and know everything at the time – today, specialization is a must (and so is professionalization) and there is so much more stuff out there for any one person to grasp everything.
Need I mention, Mary Shelly hung with this crowd. The blend of science and literature was her inspiration for one of the first science fiction novels. “Frankenstein.”
Psychology is a kind of science. These days, many people look to psychologists for answers to the questions about purpose and meaning that used to come from religious traditions.
http://chronicle.com/article/An-Intellectual-Movement-for/47500/?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
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The reasons for the lack of mixing today are pretty clear: while scientists are often knowledgeable and even accomplished in the arts, it’s very, very rare for the reverse to be true. Even worse, it’s very common for otherwise “educated” folks to be quite proud of their ignorance of the sciences.
I came across this wonderful book some time ago 🙂
Mary C @ 2 — Not only that, but Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, was a close friend of both Erasmus Darwin and Humphrey Davy (himself a poet). In fact, Godwin reviewed all of Davy’s papers before they were published, and it’s documented that young Mary would read the pre-publication drafts for her own amusement. The connection between Davy’s work on “electro-chemistry” and Frankenstein should be obvious. Mary was, of course, married to Percy Shelley, and the two, in connection with their philosophical experiments in “Free Love,” spent a lot of quality time with Lord Byron, whose illegitimate daughter from another relationship grew up to be mathematician Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. The whole science/literature web in Romantic-era England is an insane soap opera of the highest order. Who needs daytime TV?
How could anyone say the Romantic period ended in 1830? It continued at least through the 1880s and 1890s with the magnificent operas of Wagner and the music of Brahms, Tchaikowsky, Dvorak, Saint Saens, Grieg and others. As for this not being a time of great science, this later period also saw Maxwell’s Equations, which taken together with the work of Faraday that paved the way for them, make up one of the most important one-two punches in scientific history, probably the most important physics between Newton’s era and the 20th century. Einstein had a photo of Faraday in his office, and revered him as one of the greatest physicists. Who is writing this awful ignorant drivel? Doesn’t this magazine have any educated editors?
Charles, the Romantic era in music began and ended much later than the Romantic era in literature. It’s apples and oranges. The book is about science and the Romantic poets. 1830 sounds about right. Or do you consider Poe and Twain Romantics?
The Romantic era also included Lagrange, Laplace and Gauss, Priestley and Lavoisier, James Watt and James Hutton. Since it was roughly then that science and engineering began for the first time to change living conditions for the common man, it’s hard to argue that this was not a golden age for science.
“Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer.”
Actually, Ada was at best the first technical writer, not the first computer programmer. See here:
http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/03/16feature.html
Coincidentally on-topic, I wrote this poem/song a month ago, inspired by Carl Sagan and his musings on the “Pale Blue Dot” ( http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/wp_blog/?p=354 ):
WEIGHTLESS
Weightless, hovering over the clouds
Washed in the dawn’s early glow
Stateless, orbiting ’round where
You sleep, warm on the quiet Earth below
Children, explorers, perchance to dream
Vital as dust, motes on a sunbeam
Weightless, your joys and your sorrows
Heroes and cowards in sunny bronze cast
Greatness, on autumn display
Ere the wind and the wuthering blast
Peasants and emperors, triumph and rage
All are but players, on a pale blue stage
Hate-filled, posturing animals
Tear at the flesh of the prey they have caught
Sacred Hearts sacrificing
Doing the will of their childhood gods
In rivers of tears, sweat and blood
Every young man and woman in love….
And it all comes to naught
Sapiens on a pale blue dot
Higher primates on a pale blue dot
Naked apes on a pale blue dot
Also, in 1785 James Hutton introduced the world to deep time. The subsequent geologic revolution resulted in the triumph of Plutonism over Neptunism in the 1820s. The refutation of great floods (and other biblical events) by scientific observation was a huge step forward for science, and it happened during the romantic period.
The romantic era may not have had many Lone Geniuses of Physics* in it, but scientific progress plowed ahead just fine despite- or perhaps because of- that.
*Sadi Carnot may qualify as one of these, even if he doesn’t get the credit he deserves.
“the Romantic era in music began and ended much later than the Romantic era in literature. ”
This is also true of other periods in music history: Renaissance 1450–1600, Baroque
1600–1750, Classical 1750–1820, Romantic 1820–1900. Probably in all of these cases,
the corresponding periods in architecture, literature, painting etc are considered to have
started (and ended) earlier.
Don’t forget that Goethe wrote a lot on various topics in science and that his most famous
character (Faust) could be described as a scientist of sorts.
Goethe was not at all a Romantic (same with Schiller; using the German definition of “Romantic” here), in fact he was quite opposed to the Romantic movement which made its appearance when Goethe was already of advanced age.
The science of romance in undeniable.
Didn’t Coleridge also write:
What do you mean 1770 – 1830 was hardly the golden age of science, by citing only Davey, Faraday, Davy and E Darwin? What about Arago, Young, Fresnel, Laplace, Biot to name but a few.
500 Newtons to 1 Shakespeare or Milton!! You’ve got to be kidding me. Mysticism at its best.
Ørsted.
@coolstar: The reasons for the lack of mixing today are pretty clear: while scientists are often knowledgeable and even accomplished in the arts, it’s very, very rare for the reverse to be true. Even worse, it’s very common for otherwise “educated” folks to be quite proud of their ignorance of the sciences.
Bingo.
Additionally, it’s common to adapt elements of an insular and specialized artistic movement to a more mainstream application. Scientists have to give a nudge and a wink about possible applications in the future to be a blip on anyone’s radar.
And art is still mainly identified as the creative output of individuals from start to finish. The path from theory to experimentation to engineering to public awareness passes through hundreds of individuals without the same charming narrative.
And scientists are perceived as doing the bidding of giant corporations or governments with ample compensation, whereas artists are seen as satisfying a drive, frequently enduring poverty and rejection. Starving artist is an archetype, but the closest equivalent is ignored but still comfortably middle class fringe scientist.
Also, artists don’t destroy the world in movies, or insist that it’s silly to believe in the ghosts and monsters that subsequently kill people.
Psst: We artists and poets are paying plenty of attention to you guys. I suspect there are plenty of scientists who quietly dabble in the crayolas as well. One of my greatest teachers was a chemist [who it turns out] had a passion for watercolors and music.
Frankly I’d love to see an exhibition of art made by various scientists. Not just science related either, I hope. What we both share is an obsession with the things we see/experience, and generally, how things work.
None of us are one dimensional.
Paul: certainly the stereotypes are against both sides. I may be artist first, scientist second (though the reverse is certainly true of my income). I haven’t been starving since college thanks to a broad and deep scientific knowledge.
The world is changing; information is much more accessible. One need not have majored in studio art to learn to draw, and one need not have majored in aerospace engineering to build rocket parts. It may be much less common for someone to branch out and learn another side in great depth, but it does happen.
Also on the work of individuals vs groups for arts: Simply not true. Certainly there are artists who hide in their personal studios and stick to “their thing,” but most are constantly attending shows, taking classes, and exchanging ideas and critique with other artists. It’s very hard to “grow” if you never get out of your bubble. It’s only uncommon to see a final work with many names associated with it (though again, it does happen. A lot. Just for an example of a genre look up Exquisite Corpses. Or look up the many ‘factory artists’ like Peter Paul Rubens or Damien Hirst).
Unless you completely deny sciencehood to mathematics, you’ve got to include Gauss, Abel, Cauchy, and Galois in that list, plus loads of others that flourished in the earliest years of the nineteenth; since most of us consider Gauss to be the greatest mathematician of all time, a case really could be made that this was a high time for science.
JABIR’S FORMULA
I want to woo Her, not view Her
Pet Reality until She purrs
Longing to merge with Dame Nature bodily
Yearning to mingle my substance with Hers
And them content with mere observation
are nothing but Nature’s voyeurs.