The Sun, the Moon, and Mathematics

Abstract

I hesitate to pick a fight with Walt Whitman, who’s dead and can’t defend himself, but I have to wonder why he was so turned off by a few proofs and figures. The learn’d astronomer, after all, was just doing his job, trying to find out how things work. I have a feeling, though, that this poem is comforting to many people, who become dismayed, perhaps even becoming “tired and sick,” when confronted by science. To hear Walt tell it, the universe somehow became less “mystical” when Copernicus made his discoveries about the solar system. Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Whitman, but I don’t believe knowing the laws of celestial mechanics need affect a person’s ability to react on an emotional level to the beauty of the night sky. Indeed, if anything, it’s the other way round. That other great poet had it right, it seems to me: Truth is beauty (and beauty truth)—and a good thing it is for all of us, poets and astronomers alike.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—Walt Whitman