Physics Incarnate

Over 50 years ago, C. P. Snow warned that a growing chasm between scientific and literary intellectuals would leave society ill-prepared to solve its most pressing problems. In his now classic lecture (later published as an essay), ‘‘The Two Cultures,’’ Snow—who as a physicist and novelist had special insight into the problem—described the depth of the divide and appeared to chide the willful ignorance of literary scholars. ‘‘A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists,’’ he wrote. But when Snow asked the indignant humanists if they could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, few could. ‘‘Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’’’ [1] Bridging the gap between the sciences and humanities, E. O. Wilson declared, is ‘‘the greatest enterprise of the mind’’ [2]. The endeavor takes many forms, from Literary Darwinism [3] to the latest issue of Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and most frequently as disquisitions showing how science and the arts are focused on similar preoccupations (e.g., Einstein, Picasso [4]). In ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, Barri Gold, a Professor of English with a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, adds to the genre by tracing how thermodynamics and evolutionary theory suffused works of literature in the last half of the 19 century. Gold mainly focuses on major works of the Victorian age, her specialty, establishing her thesis with Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam. ‘‘In Memoriam has not been properly appreciated as the brilliant work of thermodynamics that it almost certainly is. As such, it allows us to study the literary production of ideas we think of as scientific. In Memoriam suggests, if nothing so simple as the influence of poetry on science, at least something more conversational—something I have come to call ThermoPoetics, a term intended to suggest mutual influence, common concerns, and even simultaneous discovery.’’ In Tennyson’s working out of his grief over the loss of his Cambridge friend, Arthur Hallam, Gold finds a parallel to the acceptance in the collective cultural imagination of the ‘‘shift from firstto second-law dominance.’’ The first law had grown out of Romanticism of the early 19 century (there is something soothing, godlike, about a force that can never be created or destroyed), whereas the second law provides a metaphor for a loss of power. Embracing the second law allows Tennyson to transform the energy of his fervent friendship into a more ubiquitous but less potent form. According to Gold, ‘‘God comes to look remarkably like a heat sink,’’ in which Tennyson can diffuse the homoerotic attraction that literary scholars have readily found troubling him in the poem. What Gold calls the ‘‘consolation of thermodynamics,’’ finding transformation where the senses perceive loss and waste, also makes the poem a ‘‘progressivist evolutionary narrative.’’ Prerequisite to accepting this claim is the assumption that something was in the air that crystallized into Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, because In Memoriam predates publication of The Origin of Species by ten years. Indeed, ThermoPoetics, although it doesn’t advertise it in the title, is almost equally concerned with the influence of evolutionary theory as thermodynamics on Victorian literature. For example, in In Memoriam, Gold sees these ‘‘two scientific subtexts...entangled....But evolutionary biology, the poem suggests, is able to transform waste into progress because it grows up alongside of and in conversation with the notion of transformation central to the development of thermodynamics.’’ Gold next takes up Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House. The latter is a novel ‘‘almost overwhelmed by entropy.’’ Again Gold is forced to ask, and answer, ‘‘How, we may reasonably ask, is this possible? After all, the term entropy was a decade away.’’ She traces Dickens’s thermodynamic sensibilities in the novels’ imagery and themes and draws parallels to the writing of Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase ‘‘survival of the fittest’’). Gold focuses on how most of the numerous characters in Bleak House are wasting time and energy, only to be countered by the actions of the heroine, its housekeeper, Esther Summerson. ‘‘We are introduced to her in a chapter called ‘A Progress,’ which suggests how much her ability to do useful work bucks the larger entropic trends of the novel. Her name, evoking both a star and a season,