SCIENCE AND POETRY: BETWEEN THE COMPLEXITY OF THE LEAFY AND THE TRANSPARENT

Images of complexity tend to be of one of two types: the leafy or ramified and the transparent. In the former group are the forest and the brain; in the latter group, air and light. Leafi ness, clearly, bears a direct suggestion of structural complexity: the dense, the multicoloured, the different, the interwoven, the inextricable. But transparency also has its complexity, more dynamic than structural: the turbulence of the wind, the quantum and cosmic fl uctuations of light in the eye and in the background radiation of the universe. Between the structural and the dynamic there stretches a broad domain of complexity that combines time and space, geometry and movement.