by <a href="https://instituteofreflection.com/author/hemal-jayasuriya/" target="_self">Hemal Jayasuriya</a>

by Hemal Jayasuriya

Dr Hemal Jayasuriya never ceases to be amazed at the strangeness and fascination of our world, and finds in it a subject for endless speculation. He is a published poet and is acknowledged in the International Who’s Who in Poetry. He obtained a PhD from Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Hemal also obtained a MA in Systems in Management, Lancaster University and a MSc in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University. Prior to that, Hemal obtained a BSc Honours in Biophysics from Flinders University, Australia. He is a Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and a member of the Aristotelian Society. His articles are published in international scientific journals. His poems are published in academic journals and books. Hemal is inspired by the material and immaterial in the world which shapes his poetry. He is fascinated by cosmology and scientific phenomena in the world.

POEM

In A Third Space : Science And Humanities

Numbers These problematic entities
Arising from Jena, got its tentacles
Round the Humanities to strangle them, it is said.
They do serve the Enlightenment ideals :
Critical Reason and Rationality, by bringing to bear
The concept of Measurement on which
All else rests. Ultimate grasping of it all
Is in the hands of the Mind, forming
Images mediated by those unsolid
Slippery Words, not Equations.
Thought turns to a Third Space where
The likes of Goethe and Pascal exist
Mastering both Science and Poiesis
Where the Geometrical and the Intuitive Mind
Are reconciled without the essence
Of either being lost and the Cultured Man
Roams amongst two disjoint spheres at once.
Then from there, the Mind brings into existence
NO-THING – There you have a THING, to cut the Gordian Knot.
THING : Timeless, unchanging, it becomes
The unmovable Rock : The Ultimate Axiom
Upon which the whole edifice of Mathematics is built

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