“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite!”
As quoted in Brighter Than a Thousand Suns : A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1958) by Robert Jungk, as translated by James Cleugh, p. 22
Anecdotally, when Oppenheimer was working at Göttingen, Dirac supposedly came to him one day and said: "Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say... something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand."
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Paul Dirac 23
theoretical physicist 1902–1984Related quotes
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[Léon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory, second edition, Academic Press, New York, 1962, 0-48643-918-6, 308]
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