Interdisciplinary research · Fall 2018
The Footprint of Physics in Classical Persian Literature «ردّپای فیزیک»
The question the article starts from is a teacher’s question. Standing in a physics class, wanting to read out an old couplet that genuinely bears on the topic at hand and is worth hearing as poetry — how many such couplets are there? The answer is: very few. And that scarcity is the finding. It means the set is bounded, and a bounded set can be partitioned, examined and described rather than merely admired.
What the article is not is the more familiar exercise of dressing modern results in classical verse. Its own image for that is a tailor who has cut the chest too tight and the sleeve too long: the poem is prevented from breathing, and the expectations placed on it are raised past anything it can carry. Nothing here is claimed as knowledge obtained from the poets. The question is only how, and how much, they attended to physical nature.
Once texts written to teach science are set aside — Bīrūnī’s al-Tafhīm, or Ferdowsi’s account of creation, which are about the subject and so leave no footprint of it — what remains divides cleanly in two, and each half again.
| عینیconcrete — what can be touched | سنجشیmeasured | Distances given, instruments used; motion simply described; an eyewitness report of what was seen. |
|---|---|---|
| شیءگراobject-bound | Physical definitions — acceleration, force, mass, an astronomical measure; objects — the sphere, the star, each of the four elements; phenomena — gravity, the dark of the moon, lightning, the sky changing colour. | |
| عقلیreasoned — what is argued | دستوریprocedural | Empirical rules that admit exceptions; passages that carry their argument with them; step-by-step accounts of what must happen next. |
| بنیادینfundamental | Laws taken to hold without exception; deep concepts and definitions; and what shares a border with philosophy. |
The categories earn themselves on real passages. Ferdowsi, Rumi, Sa‘di, Hafez, Naser Khosrow — each is read for what it actually asserts about nature rather than for what can be read into it. Two of them are worth having here.
کوزهای کو از یخابه پر بودچون عرق بر ظاهرش پیدا شود
آن ز سردی هوا آبی شدستاز درون کوزه نم بیرون نجست
Rumi · MasnaviA jug filled with ice-water beads on the outside; that water came from the cold of the air, it did not seep out through the jug. Which is condensation, stated correctly, and stated against the obvious wrong answer.
The other is a measurement. Naser Khosrow, early in the Safarnāma, records reaching Nishapur and adds that there was an eclipse on the last Wednesday of that month. Read against his own dating, that is Wednesday 29 Ramadan 437 AH. Set a planetarium to Nishapur on the corresponding day — Wednesday, 9 April 1046 — and the eclipse is there, peaking around nine in the morning. A line written down a thousand years ago, checked against an ephemeris, and it holds.
The full argument, the rest of the passages and the plates are in the article, in Persian.