Art, Science, and the Creative Mind
By Kelly Jane Torrance
In the 1950s, C.P. Snow famously declared that the sciences and the humanities were "two cultures" that had trouble communicating with each other. Little seems to have changed since then.
Scientists press on with the business of discovery while humanities professors, for the most part, have been sidetracked by the reign of postmodernism. Harvard University President Larry Summers caused a firestorm recently by suggesting that intrinsic differences between men and women may explain why there are fewer women at the top reaches of science. But a reading this morning of the top newspapers' reports on a "lack-of-confidence" motion on his leadership by the university's Faculty of Arts and Sciences found almost no scientists quoted, only arts professors.
Perhaps the two camps just think too differently. The different skills and temperaments required for success in each field are detailed admirably by Alan Lightman in his latest book, A Sense of the Mysterious (Pantheon). Lightman is an anomaly, a success in two very different fields. As a research scientist in astronomy and physics, he taught at Harvard and MIT. Now a novelist, the author of bestsellers like Einstein's Dreams, Lightman still teaches at MIT, but in creative writing. He grew up building rocket launchers and writing poetry.
A Sense of the Mysterious is a collection of mostly previously published essays written over the last 20 years in which Lightman explores the intersection of art and science. And those places where the two shall never meet. For unlike many practitioners of one or the other, Lightman understands that neither art nor science alone completely explains our world.
Of scientific questions that have answers, whether or not they are discovered yet, he says, "I have since come to understand that there are many interesting problems that are not well posed in the Popper or Thorne sense. For example: Does God exist? Or, What is love? Or, Would we be happier if we lived a thousand years? These questions are terribly interesting, but they lie outside the domain of science." This is a serious salvo to those evolutionary biologists who claim that their field can explain all of human endeavor.
Lightman also disputes the popular notion of scientists as objective truth-seekers. Like anyone else, they have commitments and prejudices that seep into their work: "the practice of science is a human affair, complicated by all the bedraggled but marvelous psychology that makes us human." But this is nothing to be ashamed of; it drives scientific progress. "Without a powerful emotional commitment, scientists could not summon up the enormous energy needed for pursuing an idea for years, working day and night in the lab or at their desks doing calculations, often sacrificing the rest of their lives," he writes. "Both when he was right and when he was wrong, Einstein's passion, his aesthetic and philosophical prejudices, and his personal commitment were probably essential to his scientific creativity."
But the individual is not at the center of science like he is in art, Lightman argues. His prose is at its most lovely when he explains how he turned to a career in writing after astrophysics because the latter did not afford him enough opportunity to express himself. If Einstein hadn't formulated the theory of relativity, someone else would have. On the other hand, no one but Shakespeare could have written his plays.
At the same time, there is a paradox in the creative process. He details the excitement of making one of his first discoveries in physics: "It was an experience completely without ego, without any thought about consequences or approval or fame." He later experienced the same feeling as a novelist, finally finding the right words for a scene or character.
Still, it sometimes seems difficult to believe the excitement of discovery is quite the same in both fields, when one reads Lightman's accounts of physicists like Einstein and Feynman. (Particularly interesting is his insight into how Einstein's temperament affected his science.) Lightman communicates with a light touch the exhilaration of great minds at work on great problems. Perhaps it is the thrill of youth he is really chronicling here. He notes that most scientists peak at an early age, while novelists require life experience to do their best work. He still misses his work as an active research scientist. "Sometimes, I wonder if what I really miss is my youth," he muses.
Lightman's humble, luminous prose makes science accessible to the layman and art accessible to the rational mind. In Lightman, the two cultures are finally reconciled, to invaluable effect.
*****
I have explored in this space before how Amazon.com's democratic reviewing system has changed the publishing world. But I'm not sure I could have foreseen the latest development. The New York Post reported last week that one book was reviewed on the online bookstore by its subject--who just happens to be a convicted murderer. Danny Pelosi dictated from prison a review of Kieran Crowley's Almost Paradise: The East Hampton Murder of Ted Ammon to his fiance, who posted it on the site.
"Danny maintains his innocence and vows to get the truth heard.... He has been waiting to tell the truth for 3 years now. I know this because I am Danny Pelosi!!" the review read. Amazon pulled the review, but claimed it wasn't because of who wrote it. "Amazon flack Patty Smith said the critique was removed because it wasn't a review but a rant. 'It's not a soap box--we ask reviewers to talk about the book.'"
*****
The Baltimore Sun recently devoted a fair amount of space to the story of a local writer whose book is unaccountably, as the paper implies, not selling well. "Ramsey Flynn had every reason to think his book about the ill-fated Kursk would be a hit or at least that it would make some headlines," the article begins. Cry from the Deep, published in December, tells the tale of the Russian nuclear submarine that sank near Finland in August 2000.
The writer can't seem to figure out why Flynn's book is tanking. Then, towards the bottom of the article, comes this nugget: "Making the book more challenging, his chosen topic required him to delve into a highly secretive world. 'You are trying to find out what the CIA or British Intelligence would pay millions of dollars to find out,' said Robert Moore, a journalist who wrote a similar book about the Kursk published in January 2003."
Flynn is beaten to the punch by two years, and the reporter still doesn't understand why his book isn't selling.
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
