IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 11-17-06 CONTACT: DR BILL TOTH 538-6525
SILVER CITY--Western New Mexico University English professor Bill Toth recently presented a paper at the Western Literature Association’s 41st Annual Conference, hosted by Boise State University. An international organization, the Western Literature Association is dedicated to the study of literature and culture set west of the one-hundredth meridian. Attending this year’s conference were scholars from many European countries as well as Japan and China.
Dr. Toth’s paper examined possible influence of Manhattan Project physicist Niels Bohr on the writing of New Mexico poet Peggy Pond Church. Titled “No Fission in Peggy’s Pond: The Poetry of Peggy Pond Church and Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity,” Toth’s paper compared Church’s methods of reconciling joy and sadness in her personal life and in her poetry to Bohr’s Complementarity Principle which pointed out that two seemingly mutually exclusive and irreconcilable qualities or entities may be in fact the same single phenomenon.
According to Professor Toth, during the early days of quantum theory it was Nobel-laureate Bohr who resolved the debate about whether light was composed of waves or particles. Prior to Bohr’s radical solution in 1928, theoretical physicists were divided into two mutually exclusive camps. “Bohr sided with neither,” Toth says, “instead, he proposed that a photon of light had characteristics of both a wave and a particle simultaneously. He was definitely thinking outside the box.”
“Most people would think that Church and Bohr had very little in common,” Toth maintains, “and on the surface that would certainly be the case, but their ways of viewing nature and thinking are remarkably similar.” “Certainly the transcendent quality of much of Church’s better poetry coupled with the fact that they were acquaintances in Los Alamos during the war and friends and admirers of Edith Warner strongly suggest that Church may have been influenced by Bohr’s vision,” Toth adds. “In any event,” he points out, “it’s clear that Church and Bohr did indeed think alike, and this similar intuitive vision may have allowed Church to achieve her own personal and poetic complementarity.”
A professor of English in the Humanities Department, Dr. Toth has presented numerous papers at academic conferences around the country. His poetry has appeared in “Algonquin” and “ISLE” as well as other publications. At WNMU, he teaches courses in American literature, environmental writing, grammar, and composition.
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