科学的未来是，艺术？
作者丨JONAH LEHRER
译者丨carrieshen
“我们是谁，一切事物是什么，这是人类最深沉的问题。如果我们想知道答案，就需要同时借助科学和艺术。”
上世纪二十年代早期，丹麦物理学家Niels Bohr努力对物质的结构进行重新想象。从前的物理学家认为原子的内部空间看起来就像微型太阳系统，原子核是其中的太阳，快速移动的电子是轨道上的各个星球。这便是物理学中的经典模型。
不过Bohr仍对电子进行了研究，并意识到“科学”需要引申出新的含义。电子的表现似乎有悖于任何一种传统解释。如Bohr所讲：“我们一提到原子，只能用诗的语言来描述。”普通词语无法尽意。
Bohr长久以来都迷恋立体派艺术家的画作。他极具眼光地深信：电子所在的看不见的世界属于立体派艺术家。到1923年，de Broglie已确认电子既可以是粒子形式，也可以是波的形式。Bohr坚持认为电子存在形式取决于我们如何看待这些电子。它们的根本性质等于人们的观察结果。这意味着电子完全不像微小星球，而像毕加索解构后的吉他画作，笔法模糊到仔细看才能看出端倪来。看上去如此奇怪的艺术其实诉说着真相。
丹麦物理学家Niels Bohr
人们很难相信一件抽象艺术作品实际上可能影响了科学史。立体派似与现代物理毫无共通之处。人们一想到科学进程，脑子里就会立刻闪现出以下特定词汇：客观、实验、真相。我们在科学论文的被动时态中想象真实世界的完美写照。而画作可以是深奥的，却永远佯装浅显。
将科学看作万事万物唯一的调解员是基于一条不成文的假设：艺术与时尚周而复始，而科学知识呈线性上升。科学史应遵从一个简单的等式：时间加上数据等于理解。人们相信总有一天科学将摆平一切问题。
不过现实中的科学轨迹还要稍微复杂一点点。我们知道越多的现实，关于其悖论就越明显。正如小说家、鳞翅类学者Vladimir Nabokov曾写下的那样：“掌握的科学知识越多，不可思议的感觉越深。”
上述表达适用于人类大多数基础科学，比如物理学和神经科学。这两种学科共同致力于解决一个最古老最宏大的未知提问：何为万事万物？我们是谁？
在我们能够揭开这些谜团之前，科学必须摆脱自身的限制。如何做到这点呢？我的答案是:科学需要艺术。我们需在试验期间为艺术家找一个位置，以重新发现Bohr看到那些立体派画作时所观察到的东西。科学的现存限制使人明白：鸡尾酒会上因两种文化的冲突而使双方无法交谈的案例并非仅仅是个学术问题，而是个现实问题。这样的现实问题挡住了科学的各项理论。如果我们希望在最核心的问题上得出答案，则需要连接起文化鸿沟。
毕加索画作《吉他与小提琴》
我们拥有了如此大量的物质知识，却对物质创造出了什么东西依然一无所知。我们了解突触，却不了解我们自身。事实上，简化论的逻辑暗示出人类的自我意识其实是复杂的幻想，是额叶皮层内某些流电震动所产生的伴随现象。机器中是没有鬼魂的，只有机械震动。你的大脑中有一千亿个流电细胞，其中没有一个是你，它们也不了解你、关心你。事实上，你甚至根本不存在。大脑什么都不是，不过是物质的无穷化回归，最终缩减至物理学无情的规律中。
该方法的问题在于它否认了真正需要解决的谜团。神经科学擅长于从下而上来解剖思想。但对人类自我意识的解剖似乎需要的是自上而下的方法。正如小说家Richard Powers写下的那样：“我们如果只是通过突触来认识世界，又怎能认识‘突触’呢？”神经科学的悖论在于：其惊人的发展已暴露出自身范例的局限性，简化论无法解答我们内心浮现的思想。它仍旧无法解释人类的许多体验。
神经科学的简化法没有将“我”置于万物的中心位置，而是努力探寻感受性的问题。然而像Virginia Woolf这样的艺术家们，几世纪以来却一直在研究此类现象，在思想的谜团方面已积累了大量知识。这些人建造出人类意识的精简模型来表达人类体验的纹理，将现实生活的细节提炼成散文和故事情节。这就是为何他们的小说保持历久弥新：因为内容感觉真实。为什么？因为其捕获到了现实层面，而简化论做不到。
如果神经系统科学家严肃对待这些艺术性的探索，便可更好理解自己试图解析之事物的整体性能。将某件事物分离之前了解它的结合方式有助于完成这项工作。从这个意义上讲，艺术是异常丰富的数据库，使科学的盲点有看得见的可能。如果神经科学想要找寻意识的神经性关联，或发现自我的来源，或找出主观性细胞，如果这门学科想要超越人类皮层术语库，那么得与高层次精神方面开展深入了解。这是当前科学所采用的方法所欠缺的。
Virginia Woolf
沉迷于鸦片的Samuel Taylor Coleridge早在精神方面的学科形成前，就写下关于“思考过程中思想的自我体验”的诗歌。或者瞧瞧视觉艺术的世界吧。正如神经系统科学家Semir Zeki所注：“艺术家和画家中有的是官能神经病学家，他们采用技术方法来研究大脑，这些技术对他们来说很特别。”莫奈的画作《干草垛》吸引我们，某种程度上是因为他对颜色的感觉理解到位。Jackson Pollock 的滴画能引起强烈共鸣，是因为其刺激了视觉皮层某些特殊的细胞电路。这些画家对大脑开展逆向操纵，结果发现了迷惑双眼的视觉规律。
当然，科学的标准回应会说这类艺术对科学进程来说太过散乱。美丽反映不出真理，莫奈是因为运气好。小说只是虚构作品，与实验性的事实背道而驰。这类艺术无法用图表标绘出来，也无法压缩成变量，因此不值得加以注意。但是，这样的散乱难道不是人类思想的本质么？我们的内在体验难道不是充满了跳跃性，全是不合逻辑的推论和莫名其妙的感觉？从这个意义上讲，小说的零乱与画作的抽象实际是一面镜子。正如诗歌评论家Randall Jarrell 所说：“艺术作品中包含矛盾，因此它们可以代表我们，代表这个同样充满矛盾的世界和我们自身，而逻辑化、系统化的概论无法实现这样的功能。”
乍看之下，物理学似乎离艺术的主观世界特别遥远。其理论提取于各类晦涩的方程式和超级对撞机的亚原子碎片。这个学科在不断地强调：我们对现实最基本的直觉其实是错觉，是感觉的虚构。艺术家依赖于想象，但现代物理学超越了想象。天地间的事物多于人能想象出的事物，像暗物质、夸克和黑洞。面对这般奇怪的宇宙只能去发现，不能去感受。
莫奈画作《干草垛》
然而物理学的超现实主义性质正是其需要艺术家帮助的原因。这门学科的发展已超出我们的理解能力，至少其字面意义超出了我们的理解能力。人类思想不可能理解弦理论的双位维度，或平行宇宙的可能性。我们的思想植根于一个简明的世界，在这儿，要紧的是确定性，时间永远向前流动，只存在三维空间。如果我们要超越这些固有的直觉，就只能求助于隐喻。现代物理学的反讽之处在于：一方面它试图寻找现实的最基本形式，并用数学来表示，另一方面我们却对这些超越了数学的基础完全无法理解。认识宇宙的唯一方法是借助类比。
因此，物理学的历史充斥着跳跃性的类比。爱因斯坦在思考移动的火车时得出了“相对论”。Arthur Eddington将宇宙的膨胀比作一只胀气的气球。James Clerk Maxwell将磁场想成是太空中的小漩涡，他称之为“旋涡”。“大爆炸”只是在宇宙中放了回鞭炮。 陷入宇宙炼狱的实验——“薛定谔的猫”有助于解释量子力学的悖论。若没有“橡胶水管”的类比，“弦理论”将变得难以想象。
这些比喻可能太过简化，但确实意义重大。隐喻的力量在于它可以让科学家们透过具体事物想象抽象概念，这样来领会出数学方程式的内在含义。这个我们所知的唯一世界圈定了人类的思维。
然而，借助隐喻也可能不安全，因为所有的隐喻都不完美。如Thomas Pynchon所说：“隐喻与真相背道而驰，隐喻是谎话。”存在于宇宙的弦可能的确像是橡胶水管，但也只是相像而已。太空也不是塑料球。理论一旦和平常话语相连，方程式的纯正便受到了污染。借助类比来思考，就像行走在“准确”的悬崖边上。
薛定谔的猫
这便是现代物理需要艺术的原因。一旦接受“隐喻对科学进程很重要”的观点，我们就可以想一想怎么让这些隐喻变得更好。诗人当然属隐喻高手，他们的艺术力量在于将各种含义压缩进韵律，他们还将模糊的感觉转化成生动的描绘。20世纪许多最伟大的物理学家皆因其清晰而浪漫的思维方式而闻名，如爱因斯坦、 费曼、玻尔这样的杰出人士。这可不是巧合，这些伟大的科学家借用隐喻看到了他人永远无法看到的事物，所以有了用铁路比喻相对论，用液体的下落比喻原子核。诗人能帮助物理学家创造新隐喻，改进旧隐喻，以此推动本学科的发展速度。也许我们能创造出比“橡胶水管”更好的比喻。也许明喻将有助于我们解开暗物质的谜团。正如研究“弦理论”的专家Brian Greene最近所写的那样，艺术有能力“强势颠覆我们对真实的固有判断”，促使科学想象力的触角延伸至新的事物。
然而，艺术家还可以为宇宙对话提供另外一种途径：在他们的帮助下，科学隐喻可以变得有形有状。如将抽象方程式变成实体，物理学家便可以从全新的角度探索数学的意义。毕加索通过时代思潮运用的几何学远非欧几里德式的，他永远理解不了那些方程式，却坚决用画作来表现这种思考空间的新方式。一个世纪之后，物理学家仍将他作品中那些破碎的静物作为科学的有力符号。抽象艺术使我们理解了那些难以理解的事物，哪怕只有一点点。
艺术家同样可以让神经科学受益。小说家的作品可以催生有关意识的最新理论。如果理论无法赋予各类性格真实的感觉，那么理论本身很可能也不真实。举个例子，Woolf是早期研究弗洛伊德理论的评论家，她否决了那种将自己“各种性格划成案例”的方式。画家可以探究视觉皮层的全新理论。舞蹈家可以帮忙解开身体与情感之间的神秘纽带。科学通过对艺术智慧的关注，来与艺术互相交流，也可加入进艺术的全部领域。另一方面，要想理解科学思想和理论，艺术也向科学提供了一面镜子，通过它科学可以审视自我。
C.P. Snow
散文作家C.P. Snow新创过“两种文化”的思想，他为解决不同文化而提出了一个简单的解决办法。他论述说，我们需要“第三种文化”，以缩短科学家和艺术家之间的“交流隔阂”。他说，通过互相理解，双方都将受益，因为作家可因此而了解热力学的第二法则，而科学家也因此而阅读到了莎士比亚的作品。
如今的确有新生的第三种文化，却偏离Snow所持的观点。他所说的第三种文化基于互动，而实际的第三种文化，基本上就是说科学家直接向公众谈话。当然，科学家们切断“中间人”，并向公众解释他们的研究，这样的做法是很有意义的。实践这种第三种文化的大量科学家大大提升了公众对先锋派科学的理解。
但是科学与艺术之间的协作到底指什么？如果我们真想联合人类的各类知识，那就需要创造一种新运动。这种新运动能与第三种文化和谐共处，同时又能刻意跨越文化边界，试图将艺术和科学联系起来。运动的前提是：艺术与科学这两种文化均无法孤立存在。运动的目标是：创造一种积极的反馈环路，让艺术作品引导新的科学实验，科学实验引导新的艺术作品，如此等等。科学和艺术要真正地彼此影响，而不是采用肤浅幼稚的方式彼此忽略、竞争或挑选。
现代科学无法单独解答其必须解答的宏大问题。融合两种文化可以使我们通过有用性来判断我们的知识，而非通过其起源。这两种现存的文化必须调整自身的习惯。首先，人文学科必须与科学真诚合作。艺术家必须听从自己内心的声音，同时也要重视科学对现实那激动人心的描述。
其次，科学必须认识到自己的真实并非唯一的真实。没有哪个知识领域垄断得了整个知识。正如Karl Popper这位科学的拥护者所写：“放弃‘知识的终极来源’这种想法，承认所有的知识都是以人为本，这点很重要；承认知识混合了我们的失误、偏见、梦想和希望；承认我们所能做的就是探索真相，即使其超出我们的能力范围。”追寻科学真相的过程既漫长又艰苦，而且永无止境。我们是谁，一切事物是什么，这是人类最深沉的问题，如果我们想知道答案，就需要同时借助科学和艺术，这样一来两者才能互为补充。
In the early 1920s, Niels Bohr was struggling to reimagine the structure of matter. Previous generations of physicists had thought the inner space of an atom looked like a miniature solar system with the atomic nucleus as the sun and the whirring electrons as planets in orbit. This was the classical model.
But Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” Ordinary words couldn’t capture the data.
Bohr had long been fascinated by cubist paintings. As the intellectual historian Arthur Miller notes, he later filled his study with abstract still lifes and enjoyed explaining his interpretation of the art to visitors. For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object. The art revealed the fissures in everything, turning the solidity of matter into a surreal blur.
Black Peacock, 1950
ALEXANDER CALDER
This mobile is a powerful example of how an art form can be tailored to the physiology of a specific area in the brain. Calder’s composition anticipated, artistically, the physiological properties of the cells of an area called V5, which are selectively responsive to motion and its direction. Viewed from a distance, the separate pieces of the mobile appear as static spots of varying sizes. But as the pieces move in different directions, each one stimulates only the category of cell that is selectively responsive to the direction in which the spot is moving. —Semir Zeki, Neuroscientist, University College London © Christie’s Images/Corbis
Bohr’s discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons could exist as either particles or waves. What Bohr maintained was that the form they took depended on how you looked at them. Their very nature was a consequence of our observation. This meant that electrons weren’t like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.
It’s hard to believe that a work of abstract art might have actually affected the history of science. Cubism seems to have nothing in common with modern physics. When we think about the scientific process, a specific vocabulary comes to mind: objectivity, experiments, facts. In the passive tense of the scientific paper, we imagine a perfect reflection of the real world. Paintings can be profound, but they are always pretend.
This view of science as the sole mediator of everything depends upon one unstated assumption: While art cycles with the fashions, scientific knowledge is a linear ascent. The history of science is supposed to obey a simple equation: Time plus data equals understanding. One day, we believe, science will solve everything.
But the trajectory of science has proven to be a little more complicated. The more we know about reality—about its quantum mechanics and neural origins—the more palpable its paradoxes become. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, “The greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery.”
Consider, for example, the history of physics. Once upon a time, and more than once, physicists thought they had the universe solved. Some obscure details remained, but the basic structure of the cosmos was understood. Out of this naïveté, relativity theory emerged, fundamentally altering classical notions about the relationship of time and space. Then came Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the surreal revelations of quantum physics. String theorists, in their attempts to reconcile ever widening theoretical gaps, started talking about eleven dimensions. Dark matter still makes no sense. Modern physics knows so much more about the universe, but there is still so much it doesn’t understand. For the first time, some scientists are openly wondering if we, in fact, are incapable of figuring out the cosmos.
Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about “the bridging principle,” the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.
But scientists don’t talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain—we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry—these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don’t experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.
The fundamental point is that modern science has made little progress toward any unified understanding of everything. Our unknowns have not dramatically receded. In many instances, the opposite has happened, so that our most fundamental sciences are bracketed by utter mystery. It’s not that we don’t have all the answers. It’s that we don’t even know the question.
This is particularly true for our most fundamental sciences, like physics and neuroscience. Physicists study the fabric of reality, the invisible laws and particles that define the material world. Neuroscientists study our perceptions of this world; they dissect the brain in order to understand the human animal. Together, these two sciences seek to solve the most ancient and epic of unknowns: What is everything? And who are we?
But before we can unravel these mysteries, our sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings. The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress.
Since its inception in the early 20th century, neuroscience has succeeded in becoming intimate with the brain. Scientists have reduced our sensations to a set of discrete circuits. They have imaged our cortex as it thinks about itself, and calculated the shape of ion channels, which are machined to subatomic specifications.
And yet, despite this vast material knowledge, we remain strangely ignorant of what our matter creates. We know the synapse, but don’t know ourselves. In fact, the logic of reductionism implies that our self-consciousness is really an elaborate illusion, an epiphenomenon generated by some electrical shudder in the frontal cortex. There is no ghost in the machine; there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows or cares about you. In fact, you don’t even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
The problem with this method is that it denies the very mystery it needs to solve. Neuroscience excels at unraveling the mind from the bottom up. But our self-consciousness seems to require a top-down approach. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, “If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?” The paradox of neuroscience is that its astonishing progress has exposed the limitations of its paradigm, as reductionism has failed to solve our emergent mind. Much of our experiences remain outside its range.
This world of human experience is the world of the arts. The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym. They strive to capture life as it’s lived. As Virginia Woolf put it, the task of the novelist is to “examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day…[tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” She tried to describe the mind from the inside.
Neuroscience has yet to capture this first-person perspective. Its reductionist approach has no place for the “I” at the center of everything. It struggles with the question of qualia. Artists like Woolf, however, have been studying such emergent phenomena for centuries, and have amassed a large body of knowledge about such mysterious aspects of the mind. They have constructed elegant models of human consciousness that manage to express the texture of our experience, distilling the details of real life into prose and plot. That’s why their novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.
By taking these artistic explorations seriously, neuroscientists can better understand the holistic properties they are trying to parse. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together. In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set, providing science with a glimpse into its blind spots. If neuroscience is ever going to discover the neural correlates of consciousness, or find the source of the self, or locate the cells of subjectivity—if it’s ever going to get beyond a glossary of our cortical parts—then it has to develop an intimate understanding of these higher-order mental events. This is where the current methods of science reach their limit.
What neuroscience needs is a new method, one that’s able to construct complex representations of the mind that aren’t built from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole. William James, as usual, realized this first. The eight chapters that begin his epic 1890 textbook, The Principles of Psychology, describe the mind in the conventional third-person terms of the experimental psychologist. Everything changes, however, with chapter nine. James starts this section, “The Stream of Thought,” with a warning: “We now begin our study of the mind from within.”
With that single sentence, as radical in sentiment as the modernist novel, James tried to shift the subject of psychology. He disavowed any scientific method that tried to dissect the mind into a set of elemental units, be it sensations or synapses. Such a reductionist view is the opposite of science, James argued, since it ignores our actual reality.
Modern science didn’t follow James’ lead. In the years after his textbook was published, a “New Psychology” was born, and this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn’t be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.
But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium. No one demonstrates this better than James Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce attempted to capture the mind’s present tense. Everything in the novel is seen not from the omniscient perspective of the author, but through the concave lenses of his imaginary characters. We eavesdrop on their internal soliloquies, as Bloom, Stephen, and Molly think about beauty, and death, and eggs in bed, and the number eight. This, Joyce says, is the broth of thought, the mind before punctuation, the stream of consciousness rendered on the page. Ulysses begins where William James left off.
Similarly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, enchanted with opium, was writing poetry about the “the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking” long before there was even a science of the mind. Or look at the world of visual art. As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, “Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them.” Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.
Of course, the standard response of science is that such art is too incoherent and imprecise for the scientific process. Beauty isn’t truth; Monet got lucky. The novel is just a work of fiction, which is the opposite of experimental fact. If it can’t be plotted on a line graph or condensed into variables, then it’s not worth taking into account. But isn’t such incoherence an essential aspect of the human mind? Isn’t our inner experience full of gaps and non-sequiturs and inexplicable feelings? In this sense, the messiness of the novel and the abstraction of the painting is actually a mirror. As the poetry critic Randall Jarrell put it, “It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us—as logical and methodical generalizations cannot—our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions.”
No scientific model of the mind will be wholly complete unless it includes what can’t be reduced. Science rightfully adheres to a strict methodology, relying on experimental data and testability, but this method could benefit from an additional set of inputs. The cultural hypotheses of artists can inspire the questions that stimulate important new scientific answers. Until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective—and such a perspective might require the artistic imagination—our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves.
Neuroscience, of course, believes that it has no inherent limitations. One day, a team of scientists may explain human consciousness. The bridging principle will be solved. The mystery of experience will turn out to be another trick of matter. Such scientific optimism might be right. Only time will tell. (It’s worth noting that not every scientist is quite so optimistic. Noam Chomsky, for example, has declared that, “It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”) Regardless, it’s clear that solving the deepest mysteries of the brain—what the philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard questions of consciousness”—will require a new scientific approach, one that is able to incorporate the wisdom of the arts. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. Neither truth, when seen alone, is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.
At first glance, physics seems particularly remote from the subjective sphere of the arts. Its theories are extracted from arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses. Artists rely on the imagination, but modern physics exceeds the imagination. To paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.
But the surreal nature of physics is precisely why it needs the help of artists. The science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense. As Richard Feynman put it, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” It’s a brute fact of psychology that the human mind cannot comprehend the double-digit dimensions of string theory, or the possibility of parallel universes. Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. This is the irony of modern physics: It seeks reality in its most fundamental form, and yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending these fundaments beyond the math we use to represent them. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.
As a result, the history of physics is littered with metaphorical leaps. Einstein grasped relativity while thinking about moving trains. Arthur Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon. James Clerk Maxwell thought of magnetic fields as little whirlpools in space, which he called vortices. The Big Bang was just a cosmic firecracker. Schrödinger’s cat, trapped in a cosmic purgatory, helped illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It’s hard to imagine string theory without its garden hose.
These scientific similes might seem like quaint oversimplifications, but they actually perform a much more profound function. As the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman writes, “Metaphor in science serves not just as a pedagogical device, but also as an aid to scientific discovery. In doing science, even though words and equations are used with the intention of having precise meaning, it is almost impossible not to reason by physical analogy, not to form mental pictures, not to imagine balls bouncing and pendulums swinging.” The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms, so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations. The world of our ideas is framed by the only world we know.
But relying on metaphor can also be dangerous, since every metaphor is necessarily imperfect. (As Thomas Pynchon put it, “The act of metaphor is a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you are.”) The strings of the universe might be like a garden hose, but they are not a garden hose. The cosmos isn’t a plastic balloon. When we chain our theories to ordinary language, we are trespassing on the purity of the equation. To think in terms of analogies is to walk a tightrope of accuracy.
This is why modern physics needs the arts. Once we accept the importance of metaphor to the scientific process, we can start thinking about how we can make those metaphors better. Poets, of course, are masters of metaphor: The power of their art depends on the compression of meaning into meter; vague feelings are translated into visceral images. It’s not a coincidence that many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century—eminent figures like Einstein, Feynman, and Bohr—were known for their distinctly romantic method of thinking. These eminent scientists depended on their ability to use metaphor to see what no one else had ever seen, so that the railroad became a metaphor for relativity, and a drop of liquid helped symbolize the atomic nucleus. Poets can speed this scientific process along, helping physicists to invent new metaphors and improve their old ones. Perhaps we can do better than a garden hose. Maybe a simile will help unlock the secret of dark matter. As the string theorist Brian Greene recently wrote, the arts have the ability to “give a vigorous shake to our sense of what’s real,” jarring the scientific imagination into imagining new things.
But there’s another way that artists can bring something to the cosmic conversation: they can help make the scientific metaphors tangible. When the metaphysical equation is turned into a physical object, physicists can explore the meaning of the mathematics from a different perspective. Look, for example, at a Richard Serra sculpture. His labyrinths of bent metal let us participate in the theoretical, so that we might imagine the strange curves of space-time in an entirely new way. The fragmented shapes of cubism, which engaged in such a fruitful dialogue with the avant-garde physics of its time, served a similar purpose. Picasso never understood the equations—he picked up non-Euclidian geometry via the zeitgeist—but he was determined to represent this new way of thinking about space in his paintings. A century later, physicists are still using his shattered still lifes as a potent symbol of their science. Abstract art lets us comprehend, at least a little bit, the incomprehensible.
It’s time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method. (Our universities could begin by offering a “Poetry for Physicists” class.) But it’s also crucial to take our scientific metaphors beyond the realm of the metaphorical, so we can better understand the consequences of our theories. Art galleries should be filled with disorienting evocations of string theory and the EPR paradox. Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they’re meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.
Neuroscience can also benefit from the reactions of artists. Novelists can simulate the latest theory of consciousness in their fiction. If a theory can’t inspire characters that feel true, then it probably isn’t true itself. (Woolf, for example, was an early critic of Freudian theory, dismissing the way it turned all of her “characters into cases.”) Painters can explore new theories about the visual cortex. Dancers can help untangle the mysterious connection between the body and emotion. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science extends to art the invitation to participate in its conversation and the opportunity to add science to its repertoire. And by, in turn, interpreting scientific ideas and theories, the arts offers science a new lens through which to see itself.
C.P. Snow, the essayist who coined the “two culture” cliché, proposed a simple solution to the problem of divided cultures. He argued that we needed a “third culture,” which would close the “communications gap” between scientists and artists. Each side, Snow said, would benefit from an understanding of the other, as writers learned about the second law of thermodynamics and scientists read Shakespeare.
There is currently a nascent third culture, but it strays from Snow’s conception. While his third culture was based upon dialogue, our current third culture consists, almost entirely, of scientists talking directly to the general public. As John Brockman, the founder of this new third culture, wrote: “What traditionally has been called ‘science’ has today become ‘public culture’...Science is the only news.” There is, of course, much to be said for scientists cutting out “the middleman” and translating their data for the masses. Many of the scientists that make up this third culture have greatly increased the public’s understanding of the scientific avant-garde. From Richard Dawkins to Brian Greene, from Steven Pinker to E.O. Wilson, these figures not only do important scientific research, they write in elegant prose. In doing so, they are teaching us much.
But what of the collaboration between science and the arts? Are we really prepared to live with a permanent cultural schism? If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we’ll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement—perhaps a fourth culture—is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new works of art and so on. Instead of ignoring each other, or competing, or co-opting each other in naïve or superficial ways, science and the arts will truly impact each other. The old intellectual boundaries will disappear. Neuroscience will gain new tools with which to confront the mystery of consciousness and modern physics will improve its metaphors. Art will become a crucial source of scientific ideas.
This will ultimately lead us to take a broader view of truth. Right now, science is widely considered our sole source of Truth, with a capital “T.” Everything that can’t be stated in the language of acronyms and equations risks being disregarded as a pretty fiction, which is the opposite of scientific fact.
But the epic questions that modern science must answer cannot be solved by science alone. Bringing our two cultures together will allow us to judge our knowledge not by its origins, but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem teach us about ourselves? How does it help us understand who we are, or what the universe is made of? What long-standing problem has it engaged, perhaps even solved? If we are open-minded in our answers to these questions, we will discover that poems and paintings can help advance our experiments and theories. Art can make science better.
But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science’s inspiring descriptions of reality.
At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, “It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach.” The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other.
