To celebrate the BBC2 Horizon programme on the Hubble space telescope
tonight I thought I would post my relevant poem of ten years ago.
Sorry it is a bit long.



Magicians
 
1. Man, the measure of all things

Many wonders there are, and yet none is more wonderful
than man. He journeys over the grey ocean with stormy Notos
[the south wind] crossing through waves that surge about him;
Earth, the immortal, the greatest of the gods, the tireless one,
he wears away, turning the soil with his horses as his ploughs
pass up and down, year after year.
 
With woven nets he snares the race of thoughtless birds, the
tribes of savage beasts, the sea-brood of the deep, man of subtle wit.
By his cunning he masters the animals that nest in the wilderness,
that roam across the hills; he tames the rich-maned horse, putting
a yoke upon its neck, and the unwearied mountain bull.
 
And he has taught himself speech and wind-swift thought, and the
ways of building an ordered state, and he has taught himself
to escape the arrows of the frost and of the rain, when it is hard
to sleep under the open sky --- the all-resourceful; he is never at
a loss whatever comes his way. Only from death will he not
devise an escape; although he has found ways of curing hopeless
sicknesses.
 
How skilful, passing belief, are the arts that lead him sometimes
to evil and sometimes to good! When he honours the laws of
the land and justice sanctioned by the gods, his cities stand proud
and tall; but he who rashly embraces evil is homeless. May the
man who acts thus never share my hearth, or my thoughts.
   
Sophocles: Chorus from `Antigone' [Translation: Constantine Trypanis]


2.


>From the Empire and the mad-house:
`I am going to solve everything'
Gentry's Galileo probe and the Hubble space telescope:
`There are many stars and I want them.'

Winnicott and Bettelheim, Bowlby and Laing:
`You must start from a secure base'
Malia and Knossos, Festos and Zakros:
`And we came down to the ships...'


3.


At sixteen I read Arthur Koestler's `The Sleepwalkers'
And fell in love with the adventure,
Since then I have always been a part of it.
 
Kepler and his burning faith in the music of the spheres.
Pythagoras and the magic of number.
Isaac Newton assembling the clockwork at the centre.
 
Timid cleric Copernicus overturning Claudius Ptolemy,
Regiomontanus and Nicholas de Cusa, experimenters,
The haughty Galileo doing Archimedes' work on dynamics.
 
And Aristarchus of Samos got there first,
But Plato's backlash against freedom defeated him,
As the Academy faded to the Lyceum faded to the Museum.
 
Even Aristotle felt the dead hand of Plato,
Until he freed himself in biology and his afternoon lectures.
Slave states are no supporters of invention.

Ptolemy and his epicycles ruled
For nearly eighteen hundred years,
Until Johannes Kepler got his hands on Tycho's observations.
 
And everybody knew it was an artificial concoction
But it worked
And that was good enough for the Schoolmen.
 
Tycho de Brahe, Kepler and Galileo, Newton
Urged on by Wren, Hooke and Halley
To make the first approximation.
 
Big Albert and Thomas Aquinas would have been overwhelmed.
Their simple world of Aristotelian logic
Pierced by number.
 
It was Orpheus sang to Pythagoras of number,
That gave us Euclid.
And Johannes Kepler believed in the vision.
 
Albert Einstein re-defined the centre,
Set the frames in motion
Continued the adventure.
 
Darwin and Wallace, Freud and Jung,
The Abbe' Mendel and his family of peas,
The darkness lifts.
 
Niels Bohr and Rutherford, Crick and Watson,
Enrico Fermi, Dalton and Mendeleev,
The spontaneous breakthrough.
 
Alan Turing and Johnny von Neumann,
Mountain View and Menlo Park,
The pace grows ever faster.

The solution is fifteen billion years away
And the rockets are on the way to catch the light,
Let the answer be beautiful.
 

4.


I am of the West.
Pebbles on a starlit beach,
A little boy playing on the sea-shore,
Dreams.
 
There are many worlds,
We are not alone.
First the dog, then the man;
We are on our way.
 
Voyager, Mariner,
Galileo, Hubble;
It is early days yet,
We have still to crack space-time.
 
We are beginners.
We may yet get through
By the skin of our teeth.
But it will be a close-run thing.
 
>From the clear light of the Ionian Sea
>From the powerhouse of Alexandria
>From the Universities of Paris and Bologna
>From JPL and Kennedy
 
We haven't been on our way for very long,
Only fortythousand years from the caves,
We are of the West.
We came from the beginning we.




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