The Poetry of Light: Charles H. Townes, Rabindranath Tagore, and the IIBHB
An essay by John Paulin, PhD, from the pamphlet of the 2012 Townes and Tagore Seminar on the Global Water Crisis.
Now in its third year, the Townes and Tagore Seminar is at once a celebration and a call to action. Professor Charles H. Townes, the 1964 Nobel Laureate in Physics and the 1999 and 2005 recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore and Templeton awards, is urging us to seek solutions to our planet’s escalating environmental problems with a special emphasis on the global water crisis. Likewise, he calls on us to put these solutions into effect. We cannot separate the water crisis from the expanding problems of pollution, climate change, and the loss of biological diversity. To the extent that these crises contribute to the collapse of our planet’s ecology, the human crises of poverty, hunger, and disease will grow with them. All such crises are combining to create a public health disaster of unprecedented urgency; and our organization, the International Institute of the Bengal and Himalayan Basins (IIBHB), cofounded by Dr. Townes, is fortunate to have as its sponsor for this event the Department of Public Health of the University of California at Berkeley. As our resources become more scarce, human suffering will increase; as safe and potable water becomes less available for hydration, sanitation, and agriculture, the plight of the less fortunate members of our species will grow, as will political unrest.
Yet we are also here to celebrate. For Charles Hard Townes, who invented laser technology in 1953, the study of nature is also a celebration of its beauty, wonder, and majesty. Still, for Charles this work cannot truly be counted as a celebration unless and until we strive earnestly to bring its benefits to all people without harming the other species that contribute to health and balance of our planet’s ecosystems. Today’s event is, as well, an early celebration of Charles’ 97th birthday on July 28th and a celebration of the 151st anniversary of the Bengali poet and scholar, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), whose beliefs about and hopes for nature and its ability to sustain human happiness are similar to those of Charles. So let us acknowledge the lives and good works of these men of great compassion and great insight.
Much of Rabindranath’s Gitanjali (Sanskrit for “Song Offerings”), the collection of poems for which he was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a celebration of the beauty and value of nature and our connection with it. The contemporary West remembers Rabindranath as a great poet, and while this assessment is not wrong, it is only part of the story. Like Charles, he was also a philosopher, a religious thinker, and a student of modern science. Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, stated in his banquet speech in Stockholm, that “Rabindranath would not resent the development of modern industries in India, or the acceleration of technical progress, since he did not want India to be shackled to the turning of the ‘wheel of an antiquated invention.’” Sen also tells us, “Rabindranath had a deep interest in the environment—he was particularly concerned about deforestation and initiated a ‘festival of tree-planting’ (vriksha-ropana) as early as 1928. He would want increased private and government commitments to environmentalism; but he would not derive from this position a general case against modern industry and technology.”
Rabindranath was a student of modern science and, like Charles, very much concerned with social equity and a spirituality that is in harmony with the nature and ecology of our planet. He did not regard the celebration and preservation of nature as at odds with modern scientific understandings of nature and its development for the benefit of all people. Similarly, both men have in common their belief in the ability of mutual respect to create understandings between the great civilizations of the world. For all these reasons, the IIBHB looks to Charles and Rabindranath as sources of its values and inspiration.
Finally, we should mention what these two men share in terms of their ability to shape our perceptions of the universe and to inspire us with the magnificence of their vision. In 1913, the entire world awoke to an offering of songs, a poetry that celebrated our species’ place in the cosmos. Today, nearly a century later, we might consider how Charles has awakened in us the songs of our present age. Since Isaac Newton’s time, our appreciation of nature’s exquisitely organized diversity has been advanced by a modern physics which increasingly must look to the beauty of mathematics for its formulae. Surprisingly, perhaps, mathematics, a discipline so far removed from physical experience, allows our species, aided by its technological advances, to construct and test theories which, in turn, lead to ever more profound and revolutionary understandings of the physical universe. —Grander and more beautiful statements of nature’s underlying unity. We should note here that many of the scientific revolutions that have occurred over the past half-century have done so as consequences of laser technology—and that the pure, intellectual beauty of mathematicians has blossomed more fully into our awareness of the beauty of nature itself as a result of Charles’ invention. The stories these revolutions have brought us are wonderful to hear.
Accounts of first and last things and realms beyond the senses intrigue human beings as much today as they did in past millennia. Yet, to the myths of our ancestors we have added a new kind of narrative. The Odysseys of the present age, documentaries and popular science writings, fill us with wonder and admiration by putting before us the mysteries and paradoxes of quantum mechanics, black holes, and the first moments of creation. However, these stories move us as much as they do largely because the coherent light of laser technology has led human minds and imaginations to the beauty buried so deeply in the unknown. We listen to these stories, we think about our place in the cosmos, and we realize that this poetry of light has allowed the stars to sing to us more clearly and more beautifully than ever before. The expanded and renewed sense of the wonder with which we now look to the heavens might to a large extent be considered Charles Townes’ Gitanjali and the Song Offering of modern science.
But beauty means very little without caring. Much about our planet has changed since Rabindranath’s time. As a result of the application of our scientific and technological knowledge toward unsustainable development over the past century, our planet’s ecology has deteriorated catastrophically. Today it is certain that Rabindranath would be at the forefront of the environmental movement. In fact, we can no longer afford to ignore him. —We may summarize the origin of the current environmental crises with his observation, “when we become merely man, not man-in-the-universe, we create bewildering problems, and … shut off the source of their solution.” Similarly, Professor Townes states that we are “supported by the cosmos and sustained by it…[but] it will primarily be humans themselves who will be determining their future and the future of their environment—not external events. To an embarrassing extent, we are in charge. And it will not be so much physical limitations, but our interests and sense of values which will be the primary determinants of our future.”
