Science meets poetry is exclusive to EuroScience Open Forum and now celebrates its tenth year. The year 2016 is one of important anniversaries: 400th since the death of Shakespeare and Cervantès, 500th since the publication of More’s Utopia. Manchester, as the birthplace of the industrial revolution, looms large in the poetry of our times. Wordsworth who fled pollution to the Lake District can be cast as a forerunner of the ecologist-poets. Chemistry was vital for addicts such as Thomas de Quincey. Today, we even have poetry inspired by graphene. British poets and scientists have never been ignorant of science, as exemplified by Humphry Davy, who kept a laboratory notebook also containing his verse. We have evidence that Shakespeare knew about Tycho Brahe, his contemporary. Did his knowledge extend to the controversy between Tycho and Johannes Kepler surrounding the heliocentric theory? And what were his views on astrology?
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