Abstract

Tom McLeish’s Music and Poetry of Science adds to along and complex literature looking at the creative powers of human genius. In addition to his own scientific field, McLeish draws on art, poetry, novels, music, and BBC television productions. Although positioned in the line of the ‘two cultures’ debate typically associated with C. P. Snow, McLeish reprises William Beveridge’s earlier contribution to that tradition, perhaps, to be aligned,although this McLeish does not do, with Peter Pesic’s Music and the Making of Modern Science . The task of coordinating music, poetry, and science requires more, such that the material hermeneutics of the late Irish-Belgian physicist and philosopher, Patrick Heelan might have offered a basis for fruitful dialogue, although this,too, was a missed opportunity. Given McLeish’s illustration of the beauty key to mathematics in physics via BBC television, it seems an illustration of technological millenarianism via Andrew MacKendrick’s 1951 film, The Man in the White Sui , updated for today, key in a nano-context, might be helpful in raising issues of material‘instability,’ i.e., environmental detritus, nano-waste and pollution.