Rhyming Entomology

When we went to the La Brea Tar Pits last week, Rita bought a new book for Helena, a pseudo-Dr. Seuss about insects.  Though the book bears the Cat in the Hat on the spine, the words don't have quite the grace of the great Theodor Geisel... but it's actually not bad, especially considering how hard it it to make rhymes about entomology.  For instance,

If you were as strong
as an ant, you would see
you could lift up ten cats
in tall hats... easily.

Today, teaching science with rhymes seems either infantile or silly, depending on your perspective, but there's a long history of it.  Lucretius's famous De Rerum Natura is, in fact, a huge lyric poem teaching about the wonders of nature... and inculcating its listeners into atomism, a radical intellectual posture during the Roman Empire.  In the baroque, we see similar things: Athanasius Kircher, for instance, was one of the most amazing scientists of the 17th century, and he published most of his findings as poetry.  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of my favorite philosophers, also used poetry to communicate new ideas about physics, archeology, and zoology.  In "First Dream," she mixed all of that in an amazing metaphysical salad that interpreters have been trying to understand for the last three hundred years.

These poems weren't just science education or popularization, not as we currently understand it.  The division between publishing results (for one's scientific peers) and educating the public ("dumbing-down" the results of laymen), is a relatively modern one.  Which makes me think a little: we deeply lament the scientific illiteracy of most people, but at the same time, most scientists refuse to write in a way that people without a PhD can understand.  Science becomes our priesthood, hiding its knowledge behind a screen of formulae and impossible words.  Though I lament the way that conservatives have manipulated the discourse against evolution or global warming to their own ends, the is something very good in the basic skepticism that refuses to accept what scientists say, just because they say it.

So why not require scientists who get grants from the National Science Foundation to write some of their results in Dr. Seussian rhyme?  Or make movies, paintings, or jokes?  The results would probably be pretty awful, but hardly worse than the prose in last month's Journal of the American Chemical Society.