Scientists on Art PDF

p294_byatt/mawer/lightman old 11/3/05 10:53 am Page 299 scientists on art...

p294_byatt/mawer/lightman old 11/3/05 10:53 am Page 299 scientists on art J. LIGHTMAN recognize the indifference or incompre- hension that creeps into the eyes of the lis- tener. You learn the art of self-deprecation, A tale of the art of crypsis, the art of blending, mouse-like into the background. But two loves beneath your bland and neutral exterior, you create confections of fantasy”5. Perhaps through the medium of this pas- The arts and sciences sage the reader might live,for a few moments, some of those 16 years of obsession. Perhaps provide complementary he might see the short, dumpy man walking in the monastery garden and thinking over ways of looking at his garden peas and what they might mean. the world, argues This is not to miss the point of the science: it is the point. Because, just as an artistic creation Alan Lightman. lives in the mind of its creator, so too does a scientific idea. We labour under the illusion that discoveries and ideas lie somewhere out there in nature — but in truth the science is I n childhood, I wrote dozens of poems. I expressed in verse my questions about death, my loneliness, my admiration for a in the discoverer’s head. The inherited plum-coloured sky and my unrequited love anlage was in Mendel’s mind, the uncertain for 14-year-old girls. Reading, listening, even particle was in Heisenberg’s, the Universe is thinking, I was mesmerized by the sounds in Stephen Hawking’s. That is what makes and the movement of words. Words could them so remarkable. There is little difference be sharp or smooth, cool, silvery, prickly to between this and artistic vision. Yes, you’ve touch, blaring like a trumpet call, fluid, got to do the experiments but that is not the pitter-pattered in rhythm. And, by magic, essence of it. The essence is the idea and the words could create emotions and scenes. enquiry. “What if ?” is the question posed in When my grandfather died, I buried my both literature and science. What if the grief in writing a poem, which I showed to Alan Lightman is a physicist and adjunct Thane of Cawdor were to have an ambitious my grandmother a month later. She cradled professor of humanities at the Massachu- wife and a fatal flaw in his disposition? my face with her veined hands and said, “It’s setts Institute of Technology in Boston. What if a young Raskolnikov were to beautiful,” and then began weeping all over He is the author of four novels, including attempt the ultimate intellectual violence, again. How could marks on a white sheet of Einstein’s Dreams (1993), which has been the justification of murder? What if a paper contain such power and force? adapted for numerous theatrical and grown man were to fall in love with a Between poems, I did scientific experi- musical productions. He has published two pubescent girl? Or... what if a gravitational ments. These I conducted in the cramped collections of essays and six non-fiction field were to create a curvature of the space- little laboratory I had built out of a storage books about physics and astronomy. His time continuum? What if electrons were to closet in my house. In my homemade latest book, The Discoveries, about the great be both wave and particle? What if God alchemist’s den, I horded resistors and scientific discoveries of the twentieth cen- really were to play dice? capacitors, coils of wire of various thick- tury, will be published by Pantheon Books Darwin has brought us out of heaven and nesses and grades, batteries, switches, pho- in November 2005. down to earth and surely it is no surprise that toelectric cells, magnets, dangerous chemi- uncertainty — “that final core of uncertainty cals, test tubes and Petri dishes, Bunsen I loved solving a set of connected equations, at the heart of things”4 — permeates modern burners. I loved to find out how things one logical step after another. I loved the literature and modern science alike. The worked. shining purity of mathematics, the logic, the unreliable particle and the unreliable narra- When my experiments went awry, I could precision. I loved the certainty. With mathe- tor are two sides of the same weirdly spinning always find certain fulfillment in mathe- matics, you were guaranteed an answer, as coin. And just as scientists employ thought matics. When my maths teachers assigned clean and crisp as a new $20 bill. And when experiments to focus their ideas, so a work of homework, I relished the job. I would save you had found that answer, you were right, literature is a thought experiment about this my maths problems for last, right before unquestionably right. The area of a circle is uncertain human condition. bedtime — like bites of chocolate cake await- πr2. Period. 1. Nabokov, V. Speak, Memory (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, ing me after a long and dutiful meal of history Mathematics and science contrasted 1967). and Latin. Then I would devour my cake. In strongly with the ambiguities and contradic- 2. Updike, J. Couples (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968). algebra, I loved the abstractions, letting ‘x’s tions of people. The world of people had no 3. McEwan, I. Enduring Love (Jonathan Cape, London, 2001). and ‘y ’s stand for the number of nickels in a certainty or logic. People confused me. My 4. Frayn, M. Copenhagen (Methuen, London, 1998). 5. Mawer, S. Mendel’s Dwarf (Doubleday, London, 1997). jar or the height of a building in the distance. Aunt Jean continued to drive recklessly and NATURE | VOL 434 | 17 MARCH 2005 | www.nature.com/nature 299 ©2005 Nature Publishing Group p294_byatt/mawer/lightman old 11/3/05 10:53 am Page 300 artists on science M. KULYK/SPL at great speed,even though everyone told her sometimes must originate in the mind. The she would kill herself. My Uncle Edwin asked great atomic physicist Niels Bohr compared me to do a mathematical calculation that the invisible nucleus of an atom to an oscillat- would help him run the family business with ing drop of liquid. Modern string theorists more efficiency, but when I showed him the describe the hypothesized smallest con- result he brushed it aside with disdain. stituents of matter and energy, which will Blanche, the dear woman who worked for probably never be seen by the most powerful our family, deserted her husband after he instruments, as ‘vibrating strings’ that abused her and then talked about him with ‘stretch’ and ‘break’ and ‘merge’. Such images, affection for years. How does one make sense metaphors and vocabulary arise both from out of such actions and words? IMAGE direct sensual experience and from the lan- A long time later, after I became a novelist, guage of artists and humanists who portray I realized that the ambiguities and complexi- UNAVAILABLE that experience. Scientists, in turn, must use ties of the human psyche are what give fiction, the same language to describe their extreme and perhaps all art, its power. A good novel FOR COPYRIGHT worlds, far beyond sensual experience, gets under our skin, provokes us and haunts us long after the first reading, precisely REASONS because no alternative exists except for math- ematical equations. because we never fully understand the charac- It seems to me that the most important ters. We sweep through the narrative over gift the sciences and the arts have to offer and over again, searching for meaning. each other is a recognition and synthesis of Compelling characters must retain a certain their different approaches to thinking, their mystery and unfathomable depth, even for different ways of being in the world. When the author. Once we have seen to the bottom these differences come together, often of their hearts, the novel is dead for us. uneasily, we witness the full complexity and There are questions with answers and the mystery, and ultimately the grandeur, of questions without. Scientists work on ques- being human. What makes Michael Frayn’s tions with answers. Although science is con- Copenhagen so powerful, in part, is the stantly revising itself in response to new ideas unspoken contrast between the neat world of and data, at any moment each scientist is atomic physics, where one can solve mathe- working on what is called a ‘well-posed Describing the indescribable: string theorists matical equations for wavefunctions and the problem’ — that is, a problem of such a kind use the language of artists to portray the neutron mean free paths, versus the world of and stated with such clarity that it is certain to fundamental nature of the Universe. (Computer politics, war and ethical dilemmas. And in have a definite answer. That answer may take artwork representing superstrings.) the film A Beautiful Mind, the precision of ten years to find, or a hundred, but an answer John Nash’s mathematical mind forms a dis- exists. By contrast, for artists the question is and Francis Crick have all changed our view turbing counterpoint to the confusion in his often more interesting than the answer, and of the world and our place in it. hallucinatory illusions. When I was writing often an answer doesn’t exist. How does one Then, there is the portrayal of the scien- Einstein’s Dreams, I resisted the urge to make answer a question such as “What is love?” or tist. By now, it is well known that the picture each dream world, with its own theory of “Would we be happier if we lived to be 1,000 of the scientist as the eccentric personality time, logically consistent. My Einstein, the years old?” One of my favourite passages without human feeling, pursuing truth by most celebrated envoy of rational thought, from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is this:“We the numbers, wearing sterile gloves at all was also a dreamer, a person of deep loneli- should try to love the questions times, is false. But the particular ness,struck with the frailties and urgencies of themselves, like locked rooms “We human beings have way that a person trained in log- the human heart — indeed a scientist who and like books that are written a wondrous capacity for ical thinking must negotiate his might have failed to achieve what he did in a very foreign tongue.” being rational and or her way through the illogical without his sometimes irrational personal Science has much to offer irrational,detached and world of human passions — commitments and passions. the arts. When Salman Rushdie passionate,deliberate that is a subject worthy of art. Somehow, we human beings have a won- spoke to an audience at the and spontaneous, The arts and humanities, in drous capacity for being both rational and Massachusetts Institute of craving of certainty turn,offer the sciences an essen- irrational, detached and passionate, deliber- Technology in late 1993, he and uncertainty.” tial store of other ideas, images, ate and spontaneous,craving of certainty and said: “Many of us writers of my metaphors and language. These uncertainty, seeking questions with answers generation have felt that in many ways the connections are often subtle. For his highly and questions without.We are a splattering of cutting edge of the new is to be found in the non-intuitive postulates of relativity, Einstein contradictions. In my own case, I have always sciences.”Science has always been a source of partly credited the philosopher David felt these juxtapositions as a creative tension new ideas,and artists thrive on ideas.Nicolaus Hume’s notion that the truths of nature can- necessary for my work, a continual rumbling Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, James Watson not always be arrived at by experiment but in my gut,an unsettled joy. 300 NATURE | VOL 434 | 17 MARCH 2005 | www.nature.com/nature ©2005 Nature Publishing Group