All life is fermentation, suggested physicist Richard Feynman.
I used to believe that all life is translation. I am a translator, you see. And if you stop and think about it, so much does come down to translation and interpretation. But then again, how much more comes down to fermentation! Married to an astrophysicist at Caltech, in this house we talk about Feynman a lot... but it wasn't till I read his wonderful thoughts about wine that I finally--at long last--realized just how brilliant the man really was!
Feynman doesn’t seem to know who the poet was. (And he notes — for comic effect but erroneously in my view — that poets “don’t write to be understood.”)
I believe that the imagery comes from a “scientific letter” by Italian philosopher Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1712) who cites Galileo’s [attributed] maxim, wine is a compound [mixture] of moisture [humor] and light (il vino è un composto di umore e di luce).
In Dante’s Commedia (Purg. 25, 76-78), the Latin poet Statius compares G-d’s creation of life to Nature’s transformation of moisture into wine by means of light:
- E perché meno ammiri la parola
- guarda il calor del sol che si fa vino,
- giunto a l’omor che de la vite cola.
[And, that you may be less bewildered by my words,
consider the sun’s heat, which, blended with the moisture
pressed from the vine, turns into wine.]
(Some have translated Dante’s omor [umore] with the English sap but moisture is a more accurate translation, especially given the context.)
In the light of Dante’s popularity during Galileo’s time, it’s likely (guaranteed, really) that Galileo was familiar with these lines. Magalotti cites the Dantean verses as well in his letter.
So did a poet once say that you could see the whole universe in a glass of wine?
It’s possible but unlikely.
Did the poets, as far back as Statius, consider wine to be a substance that could reveal the nature of the universe? Yes, most definitely.
https://dobianchi.com/2013/07/16/universe-glass-wine-feynman/
A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”
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