Last night I read a beautiful piece about a rowboat, responsibility, a Great Grandfather, and the Holocaust.  It got me thinking about truth – and chemistry – probably since the first-time author also showed me his Chem homework at the same time.  I got to thinking how two seemingly perpendicular disciplines can make truth in ways that are really one big ball of wax.

Both Poetry and Chemistry create and destroy.  Making stuff, then blowing it up, isn’t limited by physicality; those urges transcend time as they do intellect and memory.  Poetry about a childhood flashback recalls the real, at least as the creator defines it, in all its gauzy sensory truth.  The reader of poetry gets to define real, too, like the sifter does with flour.  What passes through is separate, or different, from that which is left behind.  And equally truthful to the cake after a few knocks of the spoon.

Chemistry on the other hand makes us discern truth via reality, it’s proxy, in more concrete and linear ways, and presumes the trajectory is the same for all “readers”.  The Scientific Method is not a poetry concept, as any lab rat will tell you.  But is this blinders-focus right, and good, for truth?

“There are two distinct ways of seeing reality, and one of them is correct and provable,” goes the Chemist’s mantra.  But what happens when the subject becomes the object?  What the subject sees shapes the seen, and carries it forth like a fact.  When the subject inserts her viewpoint instead of the truth where the object once was, do we have any less a factual conclusion, or is it simply a different one?  And how will we know?  Perhaps a bit of poetry can help discern truth from facts.

Truth is different and more revealing, as any poet will tell you.  This is not to say facts don’t matter; they do, even when they’re not right.  One look at modern American policy-making reveals political science to be more about poetry than anything.

A scientist – or policy-maker – will benefit from the poet’s chemistry when truth, not just facts, is at stake.  But that takes a genuine love of the non-linear, and a respect for science in all its chaos.  Do we have that anymore?