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The Consolation of Physics: Tennyson's Thermodynamic Solution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Barri J. Gold
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Abstract

Tennyson's In Memoriam suggests that poetic knowledge may precede and shape scientific knowledge. Struggling with the implications and possibilities of Victorian energy physics even as that science came into being, Tennyson anticipates not only the laws of thermodynamics but also many of the ways these ideas suffuse Victorian thought, from widespread anxieties regarding the death of the sun through religious invocations of the conservation of energy. In Memoriam at once evokes the roots of physical theory in Romantic elegy and suggests the elegiac structure and function of Victorian physical discourse; like In Memoriam, the laws of thermodynamics effect a reconciliation between the dissipation we observe and the conservation we crave. Moreover, as Tennyson reconceives waste as transformation in the natural world, In Memoriam also reveals a surprising relation between energy physics and another emergent science, evolutionary biology.

Type
Cluster on Science in the Nineteenth Century
Information
PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 3 , May 2002 , pp. 449 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002

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