The question may have once been which poet gets quoted when rainbows are brought up. If Keats isn’t adding to the discussion in a meaningful way anymore since his metaphors will play second fiddle to the ones that of Newton, which were wonderful and exciting enough that Newton was driven to poking himself in the eye with a needle over them. I don’t know if Keats even in his heyday could have claimed that. It may have been that his views on rainbows were propagated in some ingroup, until someone from that ingroup quoted them to someone in an ingroup with exposure to Newton’s ideas on the same. They would have looked bad when that happened, but they would likely bring up the same thing to a person who might quote Keats to them, and so on until Keats himself was bested at his own game.
The problem isn’t that Science is taking away from Rainbows, the problem is that Science is taking the power of controlling perception and justifying belief (mostly in other people) from Keats. No kidding he’s going to be unhappy about it.
Science changes the poetry dynamic Keats’ is used to because suddenly there’s competition for what gets associated with what idea in such a way that poets don’t necessarily get first dibs in the minds of people that they care about. Similar to how Galileo got in trouble for changing the scope of mathematicians from strictly below philosophers, this may be another instance of Newton changing how we view things by raising the social position of those who participate in science to where it is acceptable to challenge the status of a poet. Poets were important enough in Keats’ day that the heads of governments had their own poet on staff.
Keats just could not keep up with what was actually still wonderful to the people he would have seduced with his ideas: Darwin came later, and found wonder still left:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ”—Charles Darwin
Of course this dynamic may be changing yet. This framing of the problem leaves open the possibility that our personal ability to perceive wonder can get very broken when our computer systems produce the models for us, as described by radiolab (tl; dr when you have computer systems that can derive laws describing phenomena better than we can understand the reason behind those laws, but which nevertheless describe those systems that generate the phenomena, we may be at something of a loss when it comes to our ‘right’ to perceive wonder). Being unable to physically train your brain to assign wonder to wonderful thing seems to be a different problem than this one, more of a disability rather than anything.
The question may have once been which poet gets quoted when rainbows are brought up. If Keats isn’t adding to the discussion in a meaningful way anymore since his metaphors will play second fiddle to the ones that of Newton, which were wonderful and exciting enough that Newton was driven to poking himself in the eye with a needle over them. I don’t know if Keats even in his heyday could have claimed that. It may have been that his views on rainbows were propagated in some ingroup, until someone from that ingroup quoted them to someone in an ingroup with exposure to Newton’s ideas on the same. They would have looked bad when that happened, but they would likely bring up the same thing to a person who might quote Keats to them, and so on until Keats himself was bested at his own game.
The problem isn’t that Science is taking away from Rainbows, the problem is that Science is taking the power of controlling perception and justifying belief (mostly in other people) from Keats. No kidding he’s going to be unhappy about it.
Science changes the poetry dynamic Keats’ is used to because suddenly there’s competition for what gets associated with what idea in such a way that poets don’t necessarily get first dibs in the minds of people that they care about. Similar to how Galileo got in trouble for changing the scope of mathematicians from strictly below philosophers, this may be another instance of Newton changing how we view things by raising the social position of those who participate in science to where it is acceptable to challenge the status of a poet. Poets were important enough in Keats’ day that the heads of governments had their own poet on staff.
Keats just could not keep up with what was actually still wonderful to the people he would have seduced with his ideas: Darwin came later, and found wonder still left:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ”—Charles Darwin
Of course this dynamic may be changing yet. This framing of the problem leaves open the possibility that our personal ability to perceive wonder can get very broken when our computer systems produce the models for us, as described by radiolab (tl; dr when you have computer systems that can derive laws describing phenomena better than we can understand the reason behind those laws, but which nevertheless describe those systems that generate the phenomena, we may be at something of a loss when it comes to our ‘right’ to perceive wonder). Being unable to physically train your brain to assign wonder to wonderful thing seems to be a different problem than this one, more of a disability rather than anything.