Physics in Literature

Harry Manos

Citation: The Physics Teacher 52, 22 (2014); doi: 10.1119/1.4849148

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 Physics in Literature
Harry Manos, Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles, CA

P
hysics offers a cross-discipline perspective to under-
standing other subjects. The purpose of this paper
is to provide examples of physics in literature that
physics and astronomy teachers can use to give students
an indication of the relevance of science as depicted in the
humanities. It is not possible to cite the thousands of exam-
ples available. I have tried to select authors whom students
would be reading in high school and in college undergradu-
ate English classes: in particular Joseph Conrad, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, William Shakespeare, H. G. Wells, Fyodor
(a)
Dostoevsky, Norman Mailer, and an author currently in
vogue, Dan Brown. I am sure many reading this article will
come up with their own examples.

Gravity and ocean tides

Some years ago my high school physics students entered
my AP Physics class complaining about the novella Heart of
Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which the AP English teacher had
assigned. Students described it as “unreadable” and “impos-
sible.” Heart of Darkness is my favorite novella; imagine my
disappointment with my students’ lack of enthusiasm. When
I inquired about their problem with the book, students were (b)
fairly unanimous that if they could get past the first paragraph
Fig. 1. As the tide entered Pearl River in Canton, China, a freight-
they would have overcome a large hurdle. To my surprise, the er, formerly facing up river, was photographed (a) swinging to her
problem was not just Conrad’s vocabulary or Victorian writ- anchor, eventually (b) facing down river. Despite blocking part of
ing style. Physics held the key to understanding the nautical the river during the ship’s repositioning, boat traffic proceeded
jargon describing the opening setting in the story. without interruption and barges continued off-loading cargo. The
taught anchor chain is barely visible in both photos.

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor
without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The
flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and be-
ing bound down the river, the only thing for it was to
come to and wait for the turn of the tide.1
Students either did not understand or did not know about
river tides, referred to by Conrad as the “flood,” resulting
from tidewater entering the Thames estuary from the English
Channel. The Thames River can have tides of several meters.2
So the Nellie has dropped anchor, and, since the anchor has
taken hold, the yacht has “swung to her anchor,” preventing
it from being carried up river with the tide (Fig. 1). Once I
explained the opening paragraph of Conrad’s novella to the
students, the book became more palatable.
Conrad’s opening to Heart of Darkness is an excellent segue
into discussing Earth’s gravitational and inertial tides. Stu-
dents are familiar with tides caused by the Moon’s gravity but
are less familiar with the inertial tides on the side of the Earth
opposite the Moon caused by the Earth and Moon rotating
about the Earth-Moon barycenter, the center of mass of the
Earth-Moon system, located about a third of the Earth’s radius
below the Earth’s surface. One way to demonstrate the inertial
tide is to hold a water-filled balloon by its tie and rotate it
off-center on a table to show the water’s inertial bulge as the
balloon spins. The instructor can further discuss spring and
neap tides and, as well, how Earth’s rotation and Earth’s ocean
tides caused by the Moon’s gravity interact with the Moon,
resulting in the Moon’s orbital radius increasing by about
2-3 cm per year.
Astronomy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mari-
ner” has this line of foreboding: “From sails the dew did drip–
/ Till clomb above the eastern bar / The horned Moon, with
one bright star / Within the nether tip.”3 Putting the archaic
language into scientific context, the Earth rotates from west
to east, and “clomb above the eastern bar” is consistent with
the Moon appearing to rise, or climb (“clomb” is the archaic
past tense of “climb”) above the eastern horizon. The “horned
moon” is, of course, the crescent Moon and “nether tip” the
bottom of the crescent. One might ask students if a star ap-
peared within the lower crescent as described in Coleridge’s
poem, where would that star have to be. Since the Moon is a
solid sphere, as we look in the Moon’s direction at night we
would be in the Moon’s star shadow, and a distant, bright

22 The Physics Teacher ◆ Vol. 52, January 2014 DOI: 10.1119/1.4849148

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 star could not be seen within the crescent tip. The star would
have to be between the Earth and the Moon. If we consider
the Sun an average star and try to place it between the Earth
and Moon, since our Sun’s diameter is a little more than three
times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, both the
Earth and its Moon would be swallowed by the Sun. Students
can learn from this literary symbol the importance of dis-
tance and scale.
Shakespeare’s works are replete with astronomical refer-
ences. Everyone is familiar with Shakespeare’s star-crossed
lovers: “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes / A pair
of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”4 Shakespeare is cred-
ited with coining the term “star-crossed.”5 Many people in
Shakespeare’s time, as today, believed that planetary motion
(including the stars) has a direct influence on people’s lives.
An Elizabethan audience would have easily understood that
“star-cross’d” was a metaphor that meant Romeo and Juliet’s
love was actually “thwarted by planetary influence.”6
Physics forensics can help explain star crossing. Simply
a meteor crossing the night sky could have been seen as star
crossing. In a geocentric universe, planetary retrograde mo-
tion could not be logically explained, and likely retrograde
motion was seen as star crossing with respect to background
stars. Physics teachers have an opportunity to use Shake-
speare’s familiar metaphor, “star-cross’d lovers,” to not only
discuss various models of the solar system, but to also discuss
how superstitions can come about from unexplained events
and be dispelled through knowledge and understanding once
they are explained.
Optics
Index of refraction figures prominently in the plot devel-
opment of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. Wells uses physics
to make the fiction plausible. The Invisible Man explains his
invisibility:
[I]t was an idea, that might lead to a method by
which it would be possible, without changing any
other property of matter … to lower the refractive
index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air….
a transparent thing becomes invisible if it is put in
any medium of almost the same refractive index.7
To make his point, the Invisible Man refers to a familiar
example, making “glass invisible by putting it into a liquid
of nearly the same refractive index.”8 A well-known optics
demonstration I have done in class is placing broken pieces
of a Pyrex stirring rod into a closed, clear glass vial of clear
cooking oil, which has nearly the same index of refraction as
Pyrex glass, and passing it around the class. As the students
turn the vial, the Pyrex glass pieces disappear and reappear
as they go into and out of the cooking oil. Looking carefully
through the oil, students can see the glass pieces as faintly
“glistening surface[s],”9 which is how the Invisible Man de-
scribes himself being seen in a rain. By plausible reasoning
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and the suspension of disbelief, Wells presents a convincing
case that human tissue can have the same index of refraction
as air, thus, making the man transparent to visible light and,
therefore, invisible.
When the Invisible Man discusses the many disadvantages
to remaining invisible, he says, “for to eat, to fill myself with
unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible
again.”10 This description conjures up the image of chewed
food floating in midair as it travels down the esophagus, is di-
gested in the stomach, and is absorbed in the intestines. Pre-
med students “forced” to take physics might appreciate Wells’
imagery of unassimilated matter floating in midair. As an
example of medical physics, a barium swallow (esophagogra-
phy) images the barium with x-rays as it is being swallowed
and passing through the esophagus. To the diagnostician, the
barium appears almost as though floating in air. 11
Dostoevsky vs Lobachevsky
In the early 19th century, the Russian mathematician
Nikolai Lobachevsky developed a non-Euclidean, hyperbolic
geometry whereby parallel lines are not equidistant every-
where but converge asymptotically, “meeting” at infinity.
Think of the surface of a trumpet bell. Lines projected at 90°
relative to the circular rim of the bell’s opening down along
the tube, narrowing infinitely past the mouthpiece, are paral-
lel yet converge asymptotically. Lobachevsky, working inde-
pendently of others who also in the 19th century developed
ideas for non-Euclidean surfaces that predated Einstein’s
general relativity by 85 years, contributed to laying the math-
ematical foundation for curved spaces and gravity wells used
later in general relativity.
Fyodor Dostoevsky “speaks of Lobachevskian geometry
in very revealing terms in notes and drafts for The Brothers
Karamazov,”12 and he took advantage of poking some fun at
it. In The Brothers Karamazov (Book V, Chap. 3) the brothers,
Alyosha and Ivan, are discussing, among other things, reli-
gion. Ivan informs Alyosha:
But you must note this: if God really exists and if
He really did create the world, then, as we all know,
He created it according to the geometry of Euclid
and the human mind with the conception of only
three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and
still are geometricians and philosophers, and even
some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether
the whole universe, or to speak more widely of the
whole of being, was only created in Euclid’s geom-
etry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines,
which according to Euclid can never meet on earth,
may meet somewhere in infinity.13
Dostoevsky, apparently seeing little value in non-Euclide-
an geometry, found it an easy target to satirize by having Ivan
use mathematical logic to support his theological argument.
The average reader would find Ivan’s speech merely amusing,
23
 but a student with some physics training would appreciate
the speech on a different level knowing that non-Euclidean
geometry models natural phenomena found everywhere in
the universe.
Mechanics
Newton’s third law of motion figures prominently in Part
3, Chap. 6 of Norman Mailer’s realistic war novel The Naked
and the Dead, when General Cummings fires a howitzer:
He felt rather than saw the great twenty-foot flam-
beau of flame that discharged from the muzzle,
heard dumbly the long billowing murmurs of the
discharge through the dark closeted aisles of the
jungle. The balloon tires, the trails were still vibrat-
ing gently from the recoil.14
The trails are the open metal arms extended behind the how-
itzer preventing it from rolling backwards due to the recoil.
The last sentence might have read, “The trails were still vi-
brating the balloon tires from the recoil.” Mailer’s reversing
the word order symbolically implies a second meaning, that
General Cummings was still shaken by the blast. If we con-
sider a reaction vector along the gun’s barrel and a recoil re-
duced by one-third by the recoil mechanism, horizontal and
vertical component vectors can be calculated to determine
the component forces driving the howitzer back and pressing
down on the tires.15
Cummings, still affected by the impact of firing the how-
itzer, later that night makes entries into his diary drawing
variations of possible shell trajectories. Trying to make sense
of the war, he equates the trajectories to the rise and fall of
cultures. He then seems to recall his West Point physics train-
ing.
To carry this a step further, there are two forces con-
straining the projectile to its path. If not for them,
the missile would rise in a straight line. … The
projectile wants to go this way and gravity goes
down and wind resistance goes …. . [Mailer’s
arrows]16
He eventually concludes that without wind resistance (in
the frictionless world) the path is a parabola – as presented
in high school and college textbooks and familiar to our stu-
dents.
Matter-Antimatter
Fictionalizing science is part of making a story entertain-
ing. Dan Brown’s best-selling novel Angels and Demons is
popular among students, and the movie, starring Tom Hanks
as the protagonist Robert Langdon, was a hit. Angels and
Demons is about a portable antimatter containment canister
holding antiprotons that has been stolen. Langdon needs to
locate the missing canister before the device’s batteries run
24 The Physics Teacher ◆ Vol. 52, January 2014
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down, allowing the antimatter to come into contact with mat-
ter and liquidating “everything within a half-mile radius.”17
To learn about antimatter, Langdon relies on Vittoria Vetra,
a scientist at CERN (where else?), to teach him. She begins
by stating, “Everything has an opposite. Protons have elec-
trons.”18 When she explains how the antimatter is trapped in
the canister, she relies on a familiar concept—like magnetic
poles repel: “Same principle here. Each canister has two elec-
tromagnets, one at each end. Their opposing magnetic fields
intersect in the center of the canister and hold the antimat-
ter there, suspended in midvacuum.”19 These explanations
sound plausible but are fallacious. Protons and electrons have
opposite charge, but they are not matter-antimatter oppo-
sites. In the canister the opposing magnetic fields formed by
like magnetic poles facing one another may superimpose, but
they do not intersect nor will they hold the antimatter.
If you haven’t read the book and are wondering whether
Langdon retrieves the canister in time to avoid liquidating
everything within a half-mile radius, suffice it to say it does
not matter (pardon the pun). As Gerald Gabrielse pointed out
in Physics Today, “Brown made his millions untroubled by
the fact that all the simultaneous annihilation of all the anti-
protons ever made would not release enough energy to boil a
pot of tea.”20
We physics teachers continually refer to movies, televi-
sion shows, and science fiction in our courses to make what
we are teaching interesting and relevant for our students. I
encourage physics teachers to take an interest in what their
students are reading. Examining the science in literary works
can lead to some lively discussions, promote a deeper under-
standing of the physics and the literature, and dispel miscon-
ceptions promulgated by classic and popular literature. By
showing our students the importance of science in the hu-
manities, the more relevant science will be in their lives and
the better our chances for a scientifically literate society.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank his friends Gordon Ramsey,
Loyola University-Chicago, for graciously taking time from
his busy schedule to read the manuscript and offer sugges-
tions incorporated herein, and Joyce O’Dell, a graphic art-
ist that rescued the photos in Fig. 1 from the author’s slide
archive and rendered them into usable tiffs.
References
1. J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Dover, New York, 1990), p. 1.
2. A time-lapse video of a Thames River tidal change may be
found on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsR_
RUYJXHo.
3. S. T. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” English
Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins (Harcourt, Brace &
World, New York, 1967), p. 408.
4. W. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, edited by
Henry Norman Hudson (Ginn and Company, Boston, 1916),
p. 3.
 5. Sylvan Barnet (ed.), The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet: With New
and Updated Critical Essays and a Revised Bibliography, edited
by J. A. Bryant Jr. (Signet Classics, New York, 1998), p. xxi.
6. Ref. 4, p. 3n.
7. H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man (Bantam Books, New York,
1988), pp. 79 - 80.
8. Ibid., p. 81.
9. Ibid., p. 103.
10. Ibid.
11. A YouTube video of an x-ray of an esophagus during an esoph-
agraphic diagnosis may be found at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fCQ_MrhhGvI.
12. W. Leatherbarrow, Fedor Dostoevsky (Twayne Publishers, Bos-
ton, 1981), p. 147.
13. F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Con-
stance Garnett (Random House, New York, 1995), p. 261.
14. N. Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (Henry Holt and Company,
New York, 1998), p. 565.
15. Those wanting the specifications to make these calculations
may find online in the Internet Archive a declassified pdf
technical manual, 105-mm Howitzer M3 and Howitzer Car-
riages M3 and M3A1, used during WWII at http://archive.org/
details/TM9-1326.
16. Ref. 14, p. 570.
17. D. Brown, Angels and Demons (Pocket Star Books, New York,
2000), p. 87.
18. Ibid., p. 75.
19. Ibid., p. 78.
20. Gerald Gabrielse, “Slow antihydrogen,” Phys. Today 63 (3), 68
(March 2010).

Harry Manos is a regular contributor to TPT. He received his BA and MA

from California State University Los Angeles. Mr. Manos taught high school
physics and calculus for 32 years before retiring and taking a position
at Los Angeles City College, where he is an adjunct associate professor.
He has received LACC’s faculty appreciation award (the Spangler Award
for Excellence in Mentoring) and is a recipient of an AAPT Distinguished
Service Citation.
Los Angeles City College, 855 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA
90029; manoshc@lacitycollege.edu

The Physics Teacher ◆ Vol. 52, January 2014 25

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