By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘I am no poet,’ the scientist Michael Faraday once said, ‘but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.’ Although they’re often viewed as being at odds – such as in John Keats’s famous worry about Isaac Newton unweaving the rainbow through explaining the colour spectrum – science and poetry have often been bedfellows.
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the strange pull of bibliosmia by getting his nose literally into a book
‘There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.’ So Ray Bradbury, author of the nightmare dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world where books are burned, dismissed the long-term future of electronic books.
The life of Victorian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, told in five great pieces of trivia
1. He was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for good reason. The most famous moment of Huxley’s career was a debate about evolution that took place at the University of Oxford in 1860. Although others took part in the debate, it has gone down in history as essentially a clash between the pro-evolution Huxley and the anti-evolution Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (who was known as ‘Soapy Sam’ after a comment made by Benjamin Disraeli that the Bishop’s manner was ‘unctuous’). Interestingly, Huxley almost never took part in the debate: he had planned to leave Oxford the day before it took place. Then, a chance meeting with Robert Chambers – who had written an early book on evolution, fifteen years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published – convinced him to stay in Oxford for the debate. Thanks to this tough-minded championing of Darwin’s work Huxley was given the name ‘Darwin’s bulldog’.