Subversion 027. Physics for Poets: Frederick Turner on Healing the Divide Between Science and the Arts
Published in
1 min readMay 1, 2019
Michael sat down with the poet-philosopher Frederick Turner in Dallas, Texas at the Future of Poetry Roundtable hosted by the Dallas Institute for the Humanities.
Turner is a poet, philosopher and the Founders Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has authored more than two dozen poetry books and philosophical treatises. With Genesis and Apocalypse, he revived the epic poem by turning to science fiction and in his research, he has explored the nature of time, cosmology, evolution, and self-organizing complex systems.
Topics Covered
- The future of art and technology.
- The split between humanities and the sciences.
- The role of determinism in responsibility and art.
- The use of metaphor in explaining science.
- The philosophy of metaphor.
- The Book of Genesis and the construction of language.
- The genre of the poetic epic.
- Modernism’s rejection of tradition in all forms of art.
- How epics “deal with the edge of the world,” including the edge of the future.
- Why Sci-Fi writers gave up on utopia.
The University is … like the French Academy gone mad.
