Physics as narrative: Lewis, Pound and the London vortex

Abstract

The early decades of the twentieth century were awash in arresting ideas from the new physics that called the basic structures of time, space, matter and energy into question. One such concept was the vortex atom physicist Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) proposed in 1867 as part of the broader vortical understanding of ether physics propounded by James Clerk Maxwell. This atomic model suggested that atoms were knotted or swirling vortexes - ‘approximately circular and uniform ring[s] of elastic solid[s]’ - whose gyrations - ‘transverse vibrations of [the] ring’, ‘elliptic vibrations of [a] section’ and ‘transverse vibrations perpendicular to its own plane’ - in the ether were the basis of electromagnetic fields; in other words, according to Thomson matter and energy were related, vibratory, phenomena.1 This vortex atom and its implications for energy transmission became the central image of Vorticism, a short-lived, but influential British aesthetic movement championed by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound.2 The writing of Lewis and Pound is distinctive in this period for the ways in which it seeks to move beyond mere engagement with the concepts of physics to a strikingly literal enactment of scientific ideas in and through art, and their work serves as a productive means of interrogating the material, conceptual and ideological interface between physics and literary modernism.