In poetry, Robert Frost (1874-1963) (IQ:145|#654) [RGM:210|1,310+] was an American poet noted for []
Overview
In 1920, Frost, in his poem “Fire and Ice”, equated fire with the emotion of desire (or heat with passion), and ice with hate (or cold with aversion), in the context of the physical views of eschatology (red giant or heat death). The poem reads as follows: [1]
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
The poem is said to be the result of a 1919 dinner party conversation between Frost and American astronomer Harlow Shapley, during which time Frost grilled Shapley at length about the two rival theories of the ultimate fate of the sun and earth. [2] The icy end of times perspective is generally attributed to Rudolf Clausius’ heat death theory scenario of universal end. [3]
Religion | Science
Frost, at the turn of the early 20th century, was said to have been grappling with a conflict between science and religion, and it was not until his encounter with Henri Bergson in 1912 and the Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr in the early 1920s that he began to find, in his mind, plausible arguments against materialism. [4]
Other
Frost’s 1916 poem “The Road Not Taken”, with its emblematic lines: [5]
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
was served as the title to Morgan Peck's second law / religion themed 1978 book The Road Less Traveled.
References
1. Fire and Ice (poem) – Wikipedia.
2. Scott, George P. (1985). Atoms of the Living Flame: an Odyssey into Ethics and the Physical Chemistry of Free Will (pg. 177). University Press of America.
3. Boerio-Goates, Juliana, and Ott, J., Bevan. (2000). Chemical Thermodynamics: Principles and Applications (pg. 93). New York: Elsevier Academic Press.
4. Hass, Robert B. (2002). Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science (pg. 195). University Press of Virginia.
5. The Road Not Taken (poem) – Wikipedia.
Further reading
● Romber, Robert H. (1993). “Robert Frost and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” (abs), Physics Teacher, 31(6):360.
External links
● Robert Frost – Wikipedia.
