stamp collecting

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
—Ernest Rutherford

All poetry is either lyric or stamp collecting.

inside the atom

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

—Niels Bohr, in his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg in early summer 1920, quoted in Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory (1993) by Steve Giles, p. 28.

breeze of surprise

     There are so many ways to go, the detectives know, opposition and conflict, theories drifting over and beyond one another. Things changed by the act of observation. The old laws of physics. Speed and position. Time and distance.
     They will comb through images, looking for any random detail, the breeze of surprise, a clue. The more obscure the moment, the more valuable the knowledge. There is always a chance they will spot something they already overlooked.
     They work in much the same way as poets: the search for a random word, at the right instance, making the poem itself much more precise.

—Colum McCann, Thirteen Ways of Looking (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

physicist flummoxed by poetry

Robert Oppenheimer was working at Göttingen and the great mathematical physicist, Paul Dirac, came to him one day and said: "Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write a poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand."

(An anecdote quoted in various texts)