When worlds collide...
and why art and science are not enemies after all.
It may be the only thing in the universe that’s a fixed point, is the human mind. Once made up, you can forget about changing someone else’s, so why try? If calcification has set in, and the mind’s walls have gone from porous to impenetrable, is it worth giving it a go?
The wonderful thing about rigid walls is that they occasionally develop cracks, and through these, new concepts and ideas can seep in. Porosity can be a good thing.
In 2017 I gave a TEDx talk* about two worlds - art and science, and how people often see them as completely unrelated to one another. They are different but complementary lenses through which we view life, ourselves and each other. Both have great and equal value, and to see things through just one lens renders a person experientially challenged, monocular. It’s quite hard to develop perspective that way. Life is fundamentally stereo.
I’ve been on about this topic for a while. It became my bully pulpit relative to my work with my company, Arkitek Scientific (arkitek.com). After a decade and a half of mulling over the distrust and occasional distain displayed by both scientists and artists for the “other side”, I realized that even though many people do bridge the divide, we have a long way to go.
There was the great possibility that my mumblings on the subject would not change minds, but the kettle boiled over and I had to speak out.
Dealing with the world in a nuts and bolts, process-driven way has its advantages because it reveals how things, people and systems function. Science necessarily breaks down complex structures into digestible parts, which are then investigated to find out more about those parts. Reductionism at its best. And these are good things to know! Without all that digging, we’d be living much shorter, furtive lives.
However. Science reveals the truth about how things work in a dispassionate manner, devoid of emotional interpretation. Necessarily. Just the facts, ma’am.
Art reveals HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT, how the experience impacts you as a human being. How it changes you. These are radically different states, but they can coexist.
What if they’re merely different viewpoints?
Mobius strip
I’ve always been mesmerized by mobius strips. They seem impossible and yet, well, there they are. You can build one yourself by taking a longish thin strip of paper, flip one end over once, then tape the ends together. You have just created an object that only has one side. Trace your finger around the surface, you’ll always end up at the same point. There are not two sides, just one.
So spankingly COOL. I had a conversation with a quantum physicist several years ago about whether life, art, science, IT ALL, is like that Mobius strip, if your interpretation of something depends entirely on your vantage point, and whether multiple seemingly at odds things can simultaneously be true. A wonderful example of that is a photon, which can be both a particle and a wave. At the same time.
The science fiction writer Neal Stephenson compiled a book of essays called Some Remarks - Essays and Other Writing, that was truly mind splitting. One of the chapters spoke of a correspondence between a supporter of Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German thinker and mathematician. Newton, a genuinely unlikeable guy, couldn’t be bothered to write to Leibniz, who was refuting Newtonian physics in favor of his approach, so he bade Clarke to take it on.
This bit snared me. Leibniz stated that the fundamental particle of the universe was not the atom, but instead something he called a monad. A self-directed massless entity that CHOOSES to collaborate with all other monads, creating the universe as we experience it.
(from Wikipedia) In his day, atoms were proposed to be the smallest division of matter. Within Leibniz's theory, however, substances are not technically real, so monads are not the smallest part of matter, rather they are the only things which are, in fact, real. To Leibniz, space and time were an illusion, and likewise substance itself. The only things that could be called real were utterly simple beings of psychic activity "endowed with perception and appetite."[11] The other objects, which we call matter, are merely phenomena of these simple perceivers. Leibniz says, “I don't really eliminate body, but reduce [revoco] it to what it is. For I show that corporeal mass [massa], which is thought to have something over and above simple substances, is not a substance, but a phenomenon resulting from simple substances, which alone have unity and absolute reality.” (G II 275/AG 181)[12] Leibniz's philosophy is sometimes called ‘panpsychic idealism’ because these substances are psychic rather than material.[13] That is to say, they are mind-like substances, not possessing spatial reality. In other words, in the Leibnizian monadology, simple substances are mind-like entities that do not, strictly speaking, exist in space but that represent the universe from a unique perspective.[14] “It is the harmony between the perceptions of the monads which creates what we call substances, but that does not mean the substances are real in and of themselves.”
If so, who knows? Maybe they’ll grow tired of this universe and decide to make something new…
Not provable, so for now, not accepted. And maybe never. But the fact remains that many of the equations he came up with have been proven (by Gödel and Russell, among others), and some now form the underpinnings of quantum mechanics. No one can be right on everything, but his ideas continue to intrigue. Maybe Higgs bosons are the fabled monads…
But whatever reality actually is, we’ve barely scratched the surface. What I’m dancing around is this squishy zone between what we know, what we don’t know, and what we feel. And that makes people queasy.
Quantum physics every once in a while threatens to spill over into what almost seems like mysticism, mainly because we lack adequate instrumentation to understand what we’re encountering. Our conversation made my physicist friend quite uncomfortable. I was poking along the outer edges of science, veering into uncharted territory where little is known. Unprovable. End of conversation.
Art, on the other hand, has touched everyone deeply at least once. Theorems are not a requirement for validity. The feeling it evokes is something intangible but undeniably real. It brings emotions to the surface, creates bonds between people, and sometimes gives meaning to lives when nothing else can. We cannot live without art, it is the oxygen we breathe. Science is the ground we stand on. We cannot live without either one.
And that is my experience. I live in both worlds, sometimes pulled across the divide by one or the other, because they do sometimes act in jealous ways, but I always try to get back to that in-between. A duality of sorts, two different points of view that overlay each other, inform each other, enrich each other.
And I will get back to talking about music, and why n=9 came into being, I really will. But I feel the need to set the stage, explain why all this matters so much to me. n=9 is the fruit borne from the interplay of science and art through all of these years. It’s made from both, and I think that’s a wonderful thing.
So, as an example, here’s the night sky, peered at through two very different lens…
On one hand, there are somewhere between 2,000-10,000 stars one can see with the naked eye, depending on light pollution. Writhing, burning giant fusion reactors, hurling mind-bogglingly massive amounts of energy and matter out into space, planets arcing around them in a dangerous, cautionary dance, ultra-large gas nebulae birthing baby stars, asteroids and comets streaking through space, many with deconstruction due dates. Like a cosmic pinball machine, these colossal lumps of matter grind through time and space, till entropy eventually overtakes all. Maybe.
On the other hand - look up at the sky - it’s so beautiful! Is it black, or actually a color, not yet totally dark?
(That fact hit me a month after I started art school, having been introduced to the color wheel for the first time. I drove home, got out of the car, looked up and realized, for the very first time in my life that the sky at that moment wasn’t just DARK, it was a deep, impossibly rich shade of bluish purple.)
I feel so small and insignificant, and yet, here I am, experiencing all of this. What does it all mean? Look at Mars, I see why they call it the red planet, because that’s RED. Is that Venus? - it’s so bright! Oh my God, I just saw a meteor! I think I want to try to paint this… to share it with...
Left and right hemispheres light up, all while looking at the same thing. Each of these observations is valid. Both of them impart understanding and deep appreciation of that thing, but in markedly different ways.
I maintain that, in a perfect world, they bleed over into one another. When learning about something from a scientific POV, at some point it hits you that, by God, what you’re looking at is actually quite elegant and beautiful. And in that perfect world, moving back and forth between these two states, scientific and artistic, would be seamless. It’s illuminating that society still refers to those who exercise these twin capacities as ‘Renaissance’, expressing the awesome potential of a fully utilized mind.
But are we living in that world? Seems like science and art are much farther apart than 150 years ago, in spite of all of the advances we’ve made in both [see TEDx talk]. Here’s my take - EVERYBODY thinks in both of these ways, but they either don’t realize it, or they think they don’t have that capacity. We all do, but it’s each person’s responsibility to develop and then flex those mental muscles.
Leonardo da Vinci illuminated the path -
"To develop a complete mind: study the science of art; study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."
"saper vedere". To see wisely. THAT. There’s an entire lifetime’s worth of effort and discovery packed into those two words.
In the self-generated maelstrom that defines most lives in this twenty-first century, carving out a moment of silence and reflection is tricky. But I can guarantee you that taking 15 seconds to stop, look at literally anything and really, really see it, registering every minute detail and giving it your entire attention, will wake up you a bit.
It’ll slow the world down for a moment. It will reset you. And it will remind you that science and art, both simple and complex, are literally everywhere.
*I have to say - that talk was one of the more frightening things I’ve made myself do, more difficult than being in front of 54,000 people, or hurling myself around a motorcycle track at 140mph. I frankly thought I would die as soon as I stepped on that stage, and then an odd thought popped in. How a tiny mouse must feel after being caught in the jaws of a cat, that moment when it stops struggling, saying to the cat “oh alright, get on with it”. A fascinating surrender to whatever was coming for me. It made me laugh out loud as I stepped onto the stage. Thank God for that thought, OTHERWISE I WOULD HAVE DIED.
n=9 is an experimental music project. In addition to talking about music, from time to time we’ll push the envelope to talk about other things. In the end though, doesn’t it all come down to the way we connect with one another? And connection through music might just be the most powerful.
You are such a profound and unique thinker, Beth, your writing an amalgam of nerdy (and brilliant!) scientific observation and perspective, and the wide-eyed, passionate soul of an artist and lover of art. I find your pieces sometimes challenging for my very non-scientific brain, yet love how you pull it all together into something that not only makes sense to even my very right brain, but inspires me to be a little more curious about the science of life around us. Absolutely intriguing piece.
Love it, Beth. Thank you! Along with so many of my brethren and sistren in the late 60s, the TRUTH that everything connects to everything else came to me during my first celestial navigation during that time. Methinks it would be a better world if more people had a similar epiphany.