SOAMES’ FORESIGHT:
MODERN SCIENCE FORESHADOWED
IN FUNGOIDS AND NEGATIONS
In 1894, Ernest Rutherford, a 23-year-old New Zealander studying physics at
Cambridge, wrote to his fianceé, Mary Newton, back in New Zealand:
“I attended a passably good lecture tonight at the Royal Institution in London,
by J.J.” (J.J. Thompson, who was to discover the electron). “J.J. asked me to
come down and help with his apparatus, so it was on with the dinner jacket
and half an hour of fiddling before I could get the bow tie to sit straight
around my Adam’s apple. If you’d been here I’m sure you’d have done it in a
trice. At coffee afterwards, I basked in reflected (or should it be radiated?)
glory as people came up to J.J. bursting with questions about the physical
world. I could see that J.J. was having trouble shaking off one rather odd
cove, so I took this man by the arm and moved him to one side. ‘Perhaps I
can help?’ I said. He turned out to be some sort of famous poet – I’m not up
on that world as you know, but he certainly looked the part – and there was a
mesmerising quality about his rather gaunt face and wispy beard, as he slipped
a copy of a book of poems into my hand and asked me to give it to J.J. since,
he said cryptically, ‘it might save him years of work’. Before I could get a
chance to ask what he meant, the fellow had slipped away into the crowd.”
When I first came across this reference in the Collected Correspondence of Ernest
Rutherford (Hurst and Blackett, 1963), I knew nothing about Enoch Soames and so
this oblique reference had no significance. But two or three years ago, now an ardent
Soamesian and having occasion to look at the Correspondence again while
researching a television series, I was struck by the fact that the date –1894 – was
right, the place was right – the Royal Institution is in Albemarle Street, half a mile or
so from the Cafe Royal – and so was the description, all of them consistent with the
‘famous poet’ mentioned by Rutherford being Enoch Soames.
I might have left it at that. Letters and memoirs are full of references to chance
encounters that develop no further and apart from showing a hitherto unknown side to
Soames – if it was him – the reference seemed to have no other value. The R.I. had a
cachet about it that led people with no knowledge of science and little interest to
attend its lectures for the social benefits of mingling with scientists whose names they
glimpsed in The Times on their way through the paper to the racing pages. But within
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a few days of rereading the Correspondence I saw a Sale Notice for an auction at
Sotheby’s where I read the following:
Lot 47: Lord Rutherford – Commonplace book, contains minor notes and
jottings over the years between 1894 and 1935.
I was struck by two things – the starting date, 1894, and the fact that it covered such a
long timespan. My curiosity aroused, I went to the Sale View the day before the
auction and picked up the notebook. Opening it somewhere in the middle I came
across a sketch of a series of concentric circles and these words:
“Round and round the shuttered square”
Then, in Rutherford’s familiar scrawl, “Round and round - orbiting electrons?
Shuttered square(?) 2 protons, 2 neutrons? ‘Shuttered’ because bound? Strong
force?” Clearly Rutherford had been struck by something in Soames’ verse that
triggered a stream of questions and speculations about atomic physics. There was no
obvious indication of date on the page, but the thought crossed my mind that, if it was
written about the time Rutherford was bombarding thin metal foils with alpha
particles, it might have stimulated his own theorising that led to the splitting of the
atom.
Turning the pages I came across other familiar Soamesian lines. There was, for
example:
“Nor not strange forms”
Beside this, Rutherford had written “Minus times minus = plus – Positive electron?”.
Now, without any reference to date it was difficult to know whether this was as
startling as it seemed. If this was written any time before about 1927 it was an
astonishing phrase to use. No one at that point had any reason for thinking there
might be an electron with a positive charge, as opposed to the normal negativelycharged particle. It was only when Dirac found that there were two solutions to his
equation for the electron, a negative and a positive solution, that the theoretical
possibility of a positive electron became apparent. For Soames to have conceived of
something negative – ‘nor’ – being itself negatived – ‘not’, thus achieving a positive
charge, is prescient indeed. One could make an even more surprising inference from
the words ‘strange forms’. It was only in the late 1960s that the property of
‘strangeness’ was ascribed to quarks, those fundamental subnuclear particles. Could
Soames even have anticipated this? But perhaps I go too far.
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However, the next entry I spotted in Rutherford’s notebook was unambiguous. It was
a verse of a poem called The Mass. The quotes above come from the best known of
Soames poems, whose fame is a result of their being included in a popular piece by
the little-known essayist, Max Beerbohm. But of course Fungoids and Negations
include dozens of other poems, familiar to all Soamesians though less well known to
a general readership. The Mass has, up till now, been assumed to be part of Soames’
‘Catholick Diabolism’ phase. Here is the first verse, copied out by Rutherford in his
notebook:
The Mass
Across the sward, out streamed the light,
From fane and chapel, energized.
What caused th’infernal wave of bright
That transformated all the night?
From nothing came this force to pass?
Not so, the springhead was – the Mass.
The Mass has attracted the usual apparatus of comments and annotations.
‘Energized’ seems such a modern word to use in this context, although in fact, a few
years before Soames was writing, McLaren’s Sermons included the phrase ‘Faith will
energize us for any sort of work.’ Then there is ‘transformated’ which seems a back
formation from ‘transformation’. But ‘transformate’ as a past participle was first
used in in 1571, in Digges Pantomime, so perhaps we can allow Soames an extension
of its use here to permit scansion. But in the scrutiny that this poem has received, no
one has drawn attention to something that Rutherford spotted straight away. Here are
his words, written straight under the verse:
“I wish Soames was still alive to explain how he arrived at the mass-energy
equivalence so many years before Einstein. It’s all there – mass, energy, light,
force. If he’d written e=mc2 he couldn’t have put it much more clearly. But
then he’s a poet so why shouldn’t he wrap the idea up less prosaically than a
mere mathematical physicist?”
That this was not an isolated insight is shown by another poem, also copied out by
Rutherford, which demonstrates conclusively that Soames had been thinking along
relativistic lines a decade or more before Einstein, but because of our blinkered
culture, where scientists know about science and those of us in the humanities
decidedly don’t, no one until Rutherford had spotted it. As Rutherford notes – “The
Twins Paradox, by God!” – a verse from Soames’ poem Two Ages of Man is a clear
reference to one of the consequences of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. As a result
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of the constancy of the speed of light, we have the paradox that for someone
travelling at near the speed of light time will pass much more slowly than someone at
rest relative to the traveller. Soames clearly appreciated this as is shown in this poem,
written when Einstein was only fourteen years old:
One twin sped off to distant realms.
The other staid behind.
As decades passed, they aged apart
Lives measured by no beating heart
Nor of a common mind.
Previous commentaries on the poem have concentrated on the issue of whether
Soames was describing an early example of multiple personality. There was also
some research into the possibility that, as a boy in Preston, Soames heard stories of
two twin brothers, one of whom went to Oxford, lived life to the full (“aged apart”)
and died young, while the other stayed in Preston, worked as a clerk in a tar, rosin,
benzole and naphtha distillers, and lived to a ripe old age. Now, of course, thanks to
Rutherford’s insights, such tentative theorising can be replaced in the next annotated
edition of Fungoids by the correct explanation
In passing, it’s worth asking why Rutherford was one of the few great scientists,
perhaps the only one, who ever read Soames work. In fact, it turns out that he was a
very well-read man. C.P. Snow, who drew attention to the ‘Two Cultures’ in his
famous lecture in Cambridge, tells a story of Rutherford’s reaction when the
Archbishop of Canterbury suggested that he supposed Rutherford had no time for
reading: “Rutherford immediately felt,” writes Snow, “that he was being regarded as
an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month’s reading” –
perhaps even including, we may surmise, a rereading of Fungoids which he clearly
saw as an endless source of insights into his own field.
There is not space to treat in detail of each of the lines or verses that Rutherford
copied into his commonplace book, but here are a few more which hint at the depths
of Soames’ understanding of modern physics, before most modern physicists
understood it themselves. There is doubtless material here for a PhD or two more
about Soames’ foresight, and I have indicated in brackets likely areas of further
exploration:
“Thou hast not been nor art!” (Probably a reference to extremely short-lived
sub-atomic particles produced in particle accelerators)
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“What matter which of us runs the faster?” (Another reference to Special
Relativity)
“Life is web, and therein nor warp nor woof is, but web only.” (The Internet)
“...do let swift Mood weave there what the shuttle of Mood wills.” (The
Space Shuttle)
All this is astonishing enough, but I hope to report in the future on another very
exciting possibility, triggered by the familiar line from To A Young Woman. Like
many Soames enthusiasts, when I first read the words “Being wounded with wounds”
I took it to be a similar device to “rouged with rust” three lines earlier, but less
effective because it is devoid of the metaphorical nuances of that phrase (‘rouge’ as a
woman’s cosmetic item, etc). But the phrase kept reminding me of something and
then one day, while reading Robert Olby’s history of the discovery of DNA I realised
that all along I had been thinking of the ‘coiled coil’ concept that underlies the way in
which DNA forms itself into chromosomes. Suddenly, I realised that by reading the
phrase ‘wounded with wounds’ to rhyme with ‘sounded with sounds’ we might be on
the verge of a new understanding of Soames, as a herald of some of the major
discoveries about genetics in this century. I have been unable yet to substantiate the
use by any other writers of ‘wound’ as a noun to mean ‘twist’ or ‘coil’ but in the light
of some of Soames’ other neologisms this might not be necessary. Even a cursory
trawl through Soames’ work begins to reveal hints that his knowledge of genetics
might be far ahead of his time. The first four lines of Nocturne, for example, start
with the letters RINA. We can hardly blame him for not anticipating exactly the
abbreviation that would eventually be used for ‘ribonucleic acid’ – RNA. The
extraneous ‘I’ provides at least a plausible – and more pronouncable – abbreviation.
Then if we explore the verses further we find that the second and third lines of the last
verse both begin with ‘And’, which is, of course, DNA backwards.
I am hopeful that by rereading the Soames opus through genetic spectacles, so to
speak, we may find a whole new field of influence of this much underrated poet that
will put even his contributions to physics in the shade.
Karl Sabbagh
2041words
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