Graham Farmelo
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this final day of Closing the Gap. My name is Graham Farmelo and I’m an independent consultant from London. It’s been my pleasure and privilege to be one of the co-directors of this conference, and it’s been great to see so many of you here and to hear your feedback. It’s good that so many people are enjoying the program we put together. I’m sure that this morning is going to be one of the highlights.
There are two kinds of truth. Science is "the truth that lights the way. " Art is "the truth that warms the heart. " That was remarked by Raymond Chandler. Not my favorite author, but I think that’s a very perceptive remark. These two types of truth have much to offer each other, as we should try to explore today. In particular we’ll be looking at, broadly speaking, three branches of art: visual art, poetry and prose (through writing), and drama. Now, all these branches of art are hundreds of thousands of years old. And their content has been informed by science and technology. But science as we know it today is a relatively new practice, only as old really as the Enlightenment—yesterday in terms of human history. But today the tools of technology and the ideas of science are woven into the fabric of art.
I’d like to just look briefly at how the branches we’re looking at today are influenced by science and technology. I remember being shocked when I read in 1975, in a newspaper article, David Hockney, the talented painter, had said that by far the most exciting ideas available today are coming from science. I’d never seen much of that in his excellent work, but I was intrigued that he was so adamant in making that statement. But it’s now not only the ideas of science that we see manifested in art, but we see the techniques of technology used to create art. We see installation art reinvented by the techniques of digital technology. And we see that in, for example, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, which just opened on the shore here.
The modern novel, particularly dear to my heart, has so many examples of where science and technology have provided material for great writers. My own favorite example is John Updike. John Updike apparently felt under pressure to come up with a novel of ideas, and he chose as his first novel to do that in the one that he first wrote with a word processor as opposed to the quill and parchment. And that was Roger’s Version in the mid-1980s, which explored cosmology and quantum theory, still a glorious read, still a book that one can read with pleasure. Dozens of other writers have used as their quarry branches of science and technology, from Jeanette Winterson to Ian McEwan, right through the near impenetrabilities of Thomas Pynchon.
Not just high art, either. Dan Brown has given us Angels and Demons, a wonderfully fanciful and totally inaccurate tale of antimatter that’s made more money than all of us put together, squared, probably. And I have a slight soft part for Michael Crichton. I’ve never actually read him, but I just admire the royalties the man makes. And I was very gratified to see that he was appointed an advisor on Capitol Hill to one of the Senate committees on climate change (I’m perfectly serious), no doubt for his skill as a producer of fiction.
Poetry, too. There’s a wonderful book out by Robert Crawford, Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, which has illuminated just how much the art of poetry has been influenced by contemporary ideas in science, particularly one of my favorite examples, Miroslav Holub, the Czech immunologist. I would never forget, in a daily paper, opening up one of these rare daily papers that still has intellectual content, and it actually featured a poem by Holub, an immunologist, on string theory. I will never forget these four lines, including mathematical symbols. I don’t think it would happen in today’s newspapers, but that made a very great impression on me.
And last among the subjects today, theater. Those of you who have seen Michael Frayn’s wonderful play Copenhagen will see what somebody, a fine dramatist and novelist, can bring to that material with a rare artistic sensibility and a really good topic. He was looking at the epistemology of intent through an idea in physics, set on a stage with the shape of an atom in the National Theatre in London, and I believe in New York. Other examples, almost too many to mention. One of my favorites is Charlotte Jones’s play Humble Boy, where she re-imagines a modern version of Hamlet, weaving in the themes of string theory, for example. But the top prize for me must go to Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which, from the moment it premiered at the National Theatre in London, was one of these plays we instantly regard as a work of art, not least in the way it integrated form and function, in introducing chaos theory into Byron studies, landscape gardening, and many other topics.
There are many examples, of where art has enriched our understanding of science as a human activity. "Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth. " That was said by René Daumal, and it’s one of my favorite quotes from a French poet and critic.
Enough of me. We’ve got a great panel here today to explore the interplay between science and art in these fields. Four speakers, beginning with Clare Matterson, Director of Medicine, Science and History at the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest medical charities. It would be the largest if it weren’t for that multi-man Bill Gates, who’s got even more money to spend than the Wellcome Trust. And the Wellcome Trust has done quite fantastic work, not just in the UK but elsewhere, through their science-art program that Clare Matterson is responsible for, which has a really daring attitude towards the integration of art and science. Clare Matterson will be talking about the visual-art aspect of that wonderful program.
Lavinia Greenlaw, a very distinguished poet, has published three books of poems, most recently Minsk, and two novels and endless books of criticism. She has held residencies at the Royal Festival Hall, the Royal Society of Medicine, and also, I’m pleased to say, was the first poet in residence at the Science Museum, in a sense following Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he had spent his time at the Royal Institution in London with Sir Humphrey Davy. So we have a successor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge sitting on the platform here.
Catherine Hughes formerly ran the theater program at the Museum of Science in Boston, and is now turning that work into academic study. She will be looking at how drama can be used creatively in museums and science centers. And she wrote Museum Theater: Communicating with Visitors Through Drama in 1998, and is now completing her academic research at Ohio State University.
And finally, Alan Lightman. Alan is that extremely rare hybrid, a distinguished physicist and a truly distinguished writer. He’s a physicist at MIT and a professional writer of exceptional grace and imagination, as we saw particularly in the wonderful novel Einstein’s Dreams and in a slew of other wonderful writing that we’ve seen in some of our most distinguished organs, including the New York Review of Books and goodness knows how many other publications. Alan will be exploring the similarities and differences in the way that scientists and writers use the written word.
So it’s, I think, a terrific program. We’ll take our first two speakers, then we’ll come to you for questions, then take our final two speakers, and end with another period of questions. But first let me ask you to give a warm welcome to Clare Matterson, our first speaker.
Clare Matterson
Thank you, and can I just first say how delighted I am to be here, and I very much thank the
organizers of the conference for inviting me. I feel a little intimidated, given the quality and interest of the sessions that I’ve been to. So I just hope that we can all live up to that, especially very early on a Sunday morning.
Let me just introduce you very briefly to the Wellcome Trust. This is Henry Wellcome. He was actually American born, but luckily for us back in the U.K., he came to the U.K. and set up his company, Burroughs Wellcome, as it was originally, and the company made its money in the U.K., actually selling quite a lot of things to the U.S., but it was a U.K.-based company. And when he died, he left a really rather extraordinary will. He had an interesting personal background, and a child that he didn’t leave his company to. But he set it up as a foundation, giving trustees really a very broad way in which to manage that. And as Graham said, it has become what is perhaps one of the most interesting places, if you are interested in the biomedical sciences, in history, in the arts, that you could possibly wish to work for. So I feel very privileged to work there. As I say, it’s not only a very important medical research charity, but has a very broad interest in the social and cultural sphere within which biomedical science operates.
And that very much draws on the background of what you might call a somewhat undisciplined (undisciplined in a very good sense) man. He not only set up a pharmaceutical empire; he was interested in aerial photography, he ran archaeological digs in the Sudan, and he was one of the world’s greatest collectors. He collected over a million objects from around the world in his lifetime, and he had agents all over the world. And his objects really were anything to do with well-being. So it was a very broad concept. So within that, he collected art―less art for its sense of art, but more for what he believed it revealed about health and medicine. And I think that background of Sir Henry has given us license to have what may have seemed a somewhat eccentric and willful way in which we’ve tried to approach and tried to follow in the footsteps of our founder, in which we’ve tried to think about the relationship between art and science, and in which we’ve tried to develop scientists and artists in that area.
We’ve been working for about 10 to 15 years very explicitly within the arts. We’ve put on our own exhibitions; we’ve done some commissioning; we’ve done some collecting. And perhaps most importantly—and the thing that I’m going to talk most about today is—we started a funding scheme called SciArt in 1996, which has been partly on our own, and sometimes collaborative, and now back on our own again. And this funding scheme was very much around getting collaborations of artists and scientists to work together. I’m going to give you a few different types of examples over the years of the work that we’ve funded.
We also started in 2004 a different scheme called Pulse, which was around young people and the use of the dramatic and performance arts in relation to engaging young people. I’m not going to talk about that now, but if you look on our Web site, you can see some of the things that we’ve funded through that program. And just as we speak, we are this year bringing these two together into a larger and enriched new arts scheme, which we are actually going to be launching next week.
This painting that you see here is one of the earliest exhibitions that we actually put on ourselves, which has always intrigued and interested me. The artist is William Utermohlen, and he has Alzheimer’s. And he documented the progression of his disease through self-portraits, looking in the mirror. And he worked with the science professor Martin Rosier from the National Hospital for Neurology in London. And Martin Rosier actually therefore documented the progression of William’s disease through the self-portraits that he did. They’re therefore a series, and this one is fairly early on. And if you look then at the collection as you go through, you can begin to understand the perception and awareness that William had of his own disease as he went on. Even when he got into the stages of really quite severe Alzheimer’s, he was actually able to continue to do his self-portraits. And there is a Lancet paper which describes the research by Martin Rosier, and he summed it up by saying that the fact that William continued to paint right to the end was evidenced by him as an example of the resilience of the human spirit, in terms of the creativity element of our spirit.
But let me talk more specifically about SciArt. As I said, this has been a collaborative arts project where the most important driving principle is that scientists and artists work together. We have placed it under our "engaging science and engaging audiences " objective within the Trust, and we believe that this is a way (and we have looked at this over the years) to try to reach new audiences, audiences that would have thought perhaps science had nothing to do with them, who would have never stepped into a science museum, don’t have any interest in watching Horizon science television programs, but who actually will go and engage with an artistic interpretation.
We’ve taken a very pluralistic approach. There are many different ways of bringing artists and scientists together: scientists sometimes as advisors, sometimes as collaborators, sometimes as artists, as interpreters. And what has been of absolute importance is that the art for us, given that we are a scientific organization essentially, is not there to try to make science look pretty in any sense. We’re looking for a very strong collaboration between an artist and a scientist. And when we ask our funding committees to look at proposals that we see, an absolutely driving principle for us is that we have good art and good science, that there is no compromise on either side. And without both, we will not go forward with funding.
I’m going to give a small number of examples now, really trying to take it from a few different types of fields in which we’ve funded. This is a small film clip, and it’s an example of what’s probably the most simple form of an art and science collaboration, where the scientist is predominantly acting as the advisor to the artist. The artist is a filmmaker, Josh Appignanesi, and he wanted to make a film about his grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. He worked with researcher Errollyn Bruce, who is an expert and has worked with Alzheimer’s patients to try to understand the memories and reminiscence in dementia patients. The resulting film, which I’ll show you a very short clip of, is quite bleak, somewhat moving. It’s been shown at film festivals very widely, and has now been very much acclaimed. But I think perhaps most importantly, it is now being used really a lot for the training of care workers and young doctors, in trying to help them, as a discussion tool, to understand what it means from the patient’s perspective to have Alzheimer’s. This is just a very short clip for you.
[clip played]
The next project that I want to talk about very briefly is very different. This is where an artist worked very much as a collaborator with a scientist. It’s called Project Façade, and there are really two main strands to this work. The first strand is, the sculptor is our artist. His name is Paddy Hartley. And he’s working with a bio-engineer called Ian Thompson to help him develop casting techniques to produce a new substance, bioglass, for facial reconstruction. And bioglass is material that is less likely to be rejected by the body than synthetic materials. The technique that they’re using reflects the way that artists worked with scientists in the Second World War, to help them reconstruct the faces of injured servicemen. And this then led to the second strand of Paddy’s work, where he’s producing an artistic response to the work of a facial surgeon who worked after the First World War. His name was Harold Delf Gillies. And Paddy is reinterpreting the medical and social histories of these servicemen in an installation. This will be at the National Army Museum next year. So it’s two very interesting strands: a historical perspective and a modern perspective. And those that will go to the exhibition will be able to engage with and look at both.
A very different kind of project was funded back in 2000. This was a collaboration between a contemporary artist called Marc Quinn, who people may be aware of, and Sir John Sulston, who was one of the principal participants in the sequencing of the human genome. What we did in the Trust, we sort of acted as broker, if you like. We took Marc and John out to dinner, and then we kind of left them alone at the end of the table, to see whether they got on with each other or not. And they got on incredibly well. And John invited Marc to the labs in Sanger, where we have the human genome work going on. And Marc Quinn came back with his response to that, of a genomic portrait of John Sulston. It was made by the standard cloning methods for DNA. It took John’s DNA, broke it into segments, and treated it so it could be replicated in bacteria and then grown on a colony. And what you see there was the work that was then hung in the National Portrait Gallery, which got a very, very broad audience. And it’s described by Marc Quinn as the most realistic portrait in the gallery.
My last example is a piece of work which has always, I think, had quite a profound effect on me. This was by an artist called Alexa Wright, and she collaborated with the neurologist John Kew and the neuropsychologist Peter Halligan. And what she was trying to understand, as were the two scientists, was what phantom-limb experience actually meant and what it felt like to those that experienced it, because nowhere had it been well documented; nowhere had the sort of pains that the patients felt been described in ways that scientists could have a good understanding of. So Alexa worked with phantom-limb patients and interviewed them, where each person described in detail the history of their phantom-limb experience. And she worked with them through a series of photographs, to try to then show graphically what it was they experienced and what it was they felt. And once again, this resulted in an installation where the photographs were on display, along with detailed descriptions from a neuropsychological, physiological, and patient’s perspective.
So that’s been a very brief run through the sorts of things that we’ve funded over the years. But the very common view is that science provides such a rich and fertile range of subject matter for scientists, but I guess the question is, What do scientists get out of it? From our perspective in the Trust, obviously the engagement agenda is very important. But is that enough? Should art inform the science? If you talk to the scientists, most actually do say honestly that it’s not had a direct impact on their work specifically. But that’s not all. You may expect them to say that: it’s a profession based on objectivity, working with one which is actually much more based around the subjective understanding. But what they do acknowledge is that working with the artist, when the collaboration was really successful, changed them, changed them as a person, how they think, how they think about their science. And perhaps that’s the impact on science—enabling lateral thinking, new perspectives on the world.
What makes a true collaboration? I think it’s when each side truly engages with the project, and when barriers of interest, of language, are broken down across the piece.
Very briefly, I can’t leave here without telling you about something which we’re very excited about at the Wellcome Trust, which I think is to some extent a culmination of a lot of the work that we’ve done in art and science. We are opening in Henry Wellcome’s headquarters a brand new venue for London, which we will call the Wellcome Collection of exhibitions, galleries, events, major history of medicine library, in the summer of this year. And within Wellcome Collection we want to explore, through these spaces, the connections between medicine, life and art. We’ll have three major galleries. We will have one showing Henry’s eclectic and eccentric collection, we will have a large temporary space, and we will have a new permanent space where we will be taking some of the major topics from medicine where there have been considerable scientific developments, and exploring them very much from the perspective of contemporary science and the contemporary arts.
And I will leave you with one somewhat disturbing image. I think you will guess what the topic is when you see it. This will be one of the pieces on display, alongside the science. And it’s a piece by John Isaacs, called "I Can’t Help the Way I Feel. " Thank you.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Good morning. I’d like to echo Clare Matterson’s observations on both what a pleasure it is and an honor to be here, and also the advantage she and I have because we’re on London time, so for us it’s a slightly more human hour.
I’m going to add to the brutality of the early morning start by throwing some poetry at you. From the time fourteen years ago when my first book of poems appeared, I’ve been labeled a poet who writes about science. And I resist this label, because many other poets have and many other poets do. The divide between the disciplines is relatively recent as is the term science, because both are what is broadly called natural philosophy. I’d say that I’m interested in perception and our impulse to measure and to make sense of the world. I’m interested in a process that also informs the scientist, and I believe in an affinity of the process and of intention.
Unfortunately we also have an affinity of image. As Lawrence Krauss said yesterday, science is perceived as dull, hard, and unrelated to the world and so too is poetry. I’d like to start with one of my earliest poems, which is an investigation of darkness in which I try to describe how hard it is to fix an image. It’s called "Night Photograph: "
Night Photograph
Crossing the channel at midnight in winter,
coastline develops as distance grows,
then simplifies to shadow under-exposed.
Point of light quayside, harbour wall,
the edge of the city—
sink as the surface of the night fills in.
Points of light — quayside, harbour wall,
the edge of the city —
sink as the surface of the night fills in.
Beyond the boat, the only interruption
is the choppy grey-white we leave behind us,
gone almost before it is gone from sight.
What cannot be pictured is the depth
with which the water moves against itself,
in such abstraction the eye can find
no break, direction or point of focus.
Clearer, and more possible than this,
is the circular horizon.
Sea and sky meet in suspension,
gradual familiar textures of black:
eel-skin, marble, smoke, oil —
made separate and apparent by the light
that pours from the sun onto the moon,
the constant white on which these unfixable
layers of darkness thicken and fade.
We are close to land, filtering through
shipping lanes and marker buoys
towards port and its addition of colour.
There is a slight realignment of the planets.
Day breaks at no particular moment.
The interaction of these two very different disciplines can help overcome a few preconceptions. That the poet is only instinctive, subjective, and romantic. That the scientist is only objective, logical, and precise. If either are to be any good at their job, they have to be something of both. The poet must be rigorous and exact and the scientist imaginative and instinctive. Great scientific discoveries have been made in dreams and apparently in the bath, and there are great poems in which the most nebulous aspects of experience are rendered clear through a process of activation and orchestration of language at the deepest level. Of course each goes by different laws and has a different aim. The poet wants to articulate sensation, while the scientist wants to make sense. Yet we have a particular affinity at that moment, and this is an age at which the arts and the sciences are more than ever bound up with the variables and limitations of perception. The poet and immunologist Graham mentioned, Miroslav Holub, quoted Heisenberg saying, "Even in science the object of research is no longer nature itself but man’s investigation of nature. "
The emphasis is more than ever on process and fundamentally on the problem of a point of view. The twenty-first-century view aspires to limitlessness, and this mobility—which is there in the satellite that can read a number plate from space or the scanning electron microscope that can survey a fly’s eye as if it were a mountain—is in direct tension with our awareness of our perceptual limitations. This state of tension becomes particularly evident in the poetry beginning with the turn of the twentieth century.
Even Thomas Hardy, who’s most famous for his novels of rustic nineteenth-century England, wrote poetry in later life and read Einstein. And we’re now going to look at a small poem of his called "Heredity, " which captures the pivotal age in which he lived. It captures the move from the age of certainty with Darwin to the age of doubt with Einstein to the age of, I suppose, complete confusion, really, in which all kinds of things were unraveling.
Heredity
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance — that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.
So here we have what sounds like a good old-fashioned poem but which is saying something quite radical and, for its time, the 1920s, in a radical way. It’s written in the voice of a gene. We die, it says, but our genes leap randomly on, and that’s all there is. I’ll say more later about the potential of poetry within science education, but would like to point out here that this is a succinct and surprising way of making a point. It is memorable and musical and offers a captivating image. It could be reproduced on a label, a lift wall, or a coffee cup.
Science, especially in the form of technology is an overt and defining part of our lives. Of course we write about it and its resonances. And given that most of us don’t even understand really why the light goes on while we hit the switch, it remains magic. Even in this empirical and secular age we have this amazing amount of blind faith in machinery. Robert Musil, a physicist and naturalist, wrote in The Man Without Qualities in 1930 that if light, warmth, power, enjoyment, and comfort are mankind’s primordial dreams, that modern research is not only science but magic. Why might science need poetry? To tell it’s story. To reveal its magic.
I’d like to say something here about the image. We’re seeing the most extraordinary images during this conference and I would like to make a plea as well for the imagined image. When you are working in science education the evocation of the image through the poem can be as powerful as any sort of dazzling image that you place in front of someone, particularly a child. Musil is quick to point out that if we reduce everything to the purely scientific, we will be disappointed. The seven league boots were more beautiful than the motorcar. Dwarf King Lawrence Realm more beautiful than a railway tunnel; and to have eaten of one’s mother’s heart and to understand the language of birds more beautiful than an animal psychologist’s study of the expressive values in bird song. We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream.
The actual may be a rude awakening from the possible. But the connections between the two remain unbroken within the broader context of how we experience the world. Poetry builds on this and makes further connections. It is possible to explore resonance and implication without embroidering meaning, as Alexander Pope, the eighteenth-century poet, said in his "Essay on Criticism, "
But true Expression, like th' unchanging Sun,
Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon,
It gilds all Objects, but it alters none.
It is also dangerously easy to embroider without meaning. There must be many bad poems called Kale’s theory. And there’s at least one novel called The Uncertainty Principle. I looked it up on Amazon. It didn’t look like a good novel. Scientists get justifiably annoyed when we anthropomorphize the atom or confuse mathematics with spiritual matters. I was very interested in Connie Bertka’s talk in the pseudoscience session where she quoted a subject called Barry Beyerstein on what his criteria were for pseudoscience. And it included supplying uplifting congenial beliefs, and I thought, that’s what inspires bad poems.
Science is quite a dangerous thing for the poet. Scientists also have to describe unscientifically in order to articulate and communicate what they see. And how else can we articulate the unknown than in terms of the familiar? Anton von Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch seventeenth-century microscopist, was the first to look at globules of blood under a microscope, and he described them somewhat poetically as "looking like grains of sand on black taffeta. " And his British contemporary Robert Hook put some seeds of thyme under a microscope and said, "The grain affords a very pretty object for the microscope, namely a dish of lemons placed in a very little room. " Here is a poem by Miroslav Holub, who as we’ve said twice, is an eminent Czech immunologist who was also a poet of absolute world renown. He died, I think, in 2000. And what he has to say makes scientific sense, and could be said, of course, in a scientific way, but put like this, we can all envisage it. This poem is called "In the microscope. "
In the microscope
Here too are dreaming landscapes,
lunar, derelict.
Here too are the masses,
tillers of the soil.
And cells, fighters
who lay down their lives for a song.
Here too are cemeteries,
fame and snow.
And I hear the murmuring,
the revolt of immense estates.
My poetry is more than usually informed by science, in part because of my preoccupation with perception, but also because I grew up in a house full of it. My parents are doctors; my siblings an immunologist, an astrophysicist, and an engineer. I did not connect the conversations we had around the dinner table about laser technology or tapeworms with the science I was being taught at school and I have no sense of delicate table conversation because of that.
You could be eating spaghetti and talking about tapeworms. The science at school to me was utterly boring. It was chalk on blackboard with the occasional excitement of something fizzing over a Bunsen burner or the chance to dissect a bull’s eye. My first job in publishing many years ago was at the Imperial College of Science and Technology and I had to revise the prospectus and they just had photographs of students—usually students with terrible haircuts--sitting, looking at a computer screen. And I went off to the library and said, "Look what you have here. You have these images from a scanning electron microscope. That is what you should be putting in your prospectus, not the student with the bad hair looking at the screen. "
Despite professing no interest in the other culture, I absorbed more of it than I had thought. When I published my first book, I didn’t notice how much scientific imagery I used, nor did I think it unusual. And as I said, it isn’t really. I support remarks made here by Shirley Ann Jackson about the importance of broadening education and I certainly regret the narrowness of my own. I don’t have mathematics, and that means I can never really properly grasp most science.
In 1994, I was making a radio program for the BBC at the London Science Museum about poetry and science. And this led to Graham Farmelo asking if I might be interested in a residency. I spent eight months in the museum. I wrote poems about objects I came to know intimately, from the telegraph machine to the iron lung, and I researched a series of posters for schools in which we combined images from the museum’s archives with poems old and new which could show not only that the concerns that scientists have are universal and historical, but that people have always wanted to make sense of clouds or stars and they’ve always wanted to fly. I organized events in which poets and scientists were encouraged to argue with one another and they did—for hours. We had Miroslav Holub come to the museum and he gave a fantastic interview. I invited my immunologist sister along, and she brought a bunch of her friends from her department when Miroslav Holub read his poems, which I thought I knew really well. The immunologists kept laughing, and I found out that there are all these immunological in-jokes in his poems which I had never known were there.
So why poems? Why when you can have all these other things in your institutions and your programs, why poems? Why not some all-singing, all-dancing media event? An imposing sculpture or a video installation? Poetry is all about stealth, and sometimes people engage more deeply with the unexpected and with something which reveals itself slowly and also intimately, a poem can be one to one. I think the most effective way to get people to engage with a poem is to have them come across it unexpectedly. You’ll be aware—because you’ve had it here—of poems on the underground or poems on your transit systems or so on. This way they’re not made nervous or self-conscious by that dread phrase, "You are about to read a poem. "
They engage confidently and before they know what they’re doing they are in the poem and understanding it. Poems are small, portable, and cheap to reproduce. They catch in the corner of the eye. Poems can be placed next to exhibits, in lifts, in waiting rooms, in journals, in postcards, on T-shirts. Poetry workshops give people access to a more expansive and creative use of language and this can be particularly useful when you’re working with people with learning difficulties or people with English as a Second Language. It helps them with image and imagination in ways that help them to grasp and articulate scientific concepts. Adult or child.
Now that we have microelectronics and black books technology, we need analogy more than ever. It’s one thing explaining one steam engine when it’s sitting in front of you and say this lever goes down and the steam goes here, but try explaining a microchip without using analogy. More recently I’ve edited an anthology of poems about medicine which range from Horace complaining about the digestive effect of garlic to poems on sleep medicine, autism, and neuropsychology. And this was for the Calouste Banking Foundation and we commissioned poets who did as Clare Matterson was saying, work, collaborating with medics in order to do this. This is really where science and poetry explore, not only how things work, but how they go wrong. And this situation of going wrong calls for a mode of articulation which will accommodate rupture, an expressive structure which puts in place the experience of being out of place.
Poetry is suited to this. Consider Bob Hicok’s poem about Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s
Chairs move by themselves and books.
Grandchildren visit, stand
new and nameless, their faces’ puzzles
missing pieces. She’s like a fish
in deep ocean, its body made of light.
She floats through rooms, through
my eyes, an old woman bereft
of chronicle, the parable of her life.
And though she’s almost a child
there’s still blood between us:
I passed through her to arrive.
So I protect her from knives,
stairs, from the street that calls
as rivers do, a summons to walk away,
to follow. And dress her,
demonstrate how buttons work,
when she sometimes looks up
and says my name, the sound arriving
like the trill of a bird so rare
it’s rumored no longer to exist.
In 1932 Aldous Huxley wrote in Text and Pretext, "In the course of the last half century, the conceptions in terms of which men interpret their experience have been altered by science out of all recognition. Superficially, therefore, much of the great poetry of the past is out of date. " Huxley is saying that if science has taught us that we have a heliocentric universe, that vision comes as much from the mind as the eye, or that cholera can be spread through contaminated water. What is to us Homer or Shakespeare, he goes on to say, "Only superficially for the fundamental experience remains unaltered. Great poetry is about the fundamental experience of the world, something science is still unpacking. "
And you’re not going to get away without one more poem. I’ll finish with this. It’s one of my science museum poems which I wrote because every day I had to get the key to my office by walking through the telecommunications gallery and I’d look at the telegraph machines and I thought, this is a far more apt analogy for the variables and hazards of communication than the fiber optic. All those wires and switches which could all go wrong. That’s really the problem of communication made visible.
A World Where News Travelled Slowly
It could take from Monday to Thursday
and three horses. The ink was unstable,
the characters cramped, the paper tore where it creased.
Stained with the leather and sweat of its journey,
the envelope absorbed each climatic shift,
as well as the salt and grease of the rider
who handed it over with a four-day chance
that by now things were different and while the head
had to listen, the heart could wait.
Semaphore was invented at a time of revolution;
the judgement of swing in a vertical arm.
News travelled letter by letter, along a chain of towers,
each built within telescopic distance of the next.
The clattering mechanics of the six-shutter telegraph
still took three men with all their variables
added to those of light and weather,
to read, record and pass the message on.
Now words are faster, smaller, harder
… we’re almost talking in one another’s arms.
Coded and squeezed, what chance has my voice
to reach your voice unaltered and to leave no trace?
Nets tighten across the sky and the sea bed.
When London made contact with New York,
there were such fireworks, City Hall caught light.
It could have burned to the ground.
Thank you.
Graham Farmelo
Thank you, Lavinia. Thank you Clare Matterson for those most marvelous presentations. Now I’m delighted to say there’s an opportunity for questions from the floor. Gentleman at the back.
Audience
Thank you very much for your poetry. A question. If we were perhaps in the sixties, we would have poets like Kerouac. Today we have a form of poetry called rap. What would you think of that in science center—expressing the opinions of minorities?
Lavinia Greenlaw
I think rap is one of the most interesting areas of development in both poetry and music and there’s enormous skill going into the invention of language and the variation of form within it. I’ve seen it used with young people in museums and in other institutions. I think that it works extremely well. Probably a lot better than me going in and reading them Thomas Hardy.
Graham Farmelo
I think you’re being a little modest, but I might say I was startled and intrigued to hear Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate, complimenting Eminem on the poetry of his lyrics. I’m serious. Clare?
Clare Matterson
We have actually had rap from some local—our offices are in King’s Cross which is a very diverse neighborhood and we try to do a lot of work with the community, and we had some young black men—young men and women come in and did some rap performance within our atrium that they had developed through a scheme that they’re involved with in King’s Cross. And we had all our trustees and many scientists come along to this. It was perhaps one of the most nerve-wracking, but by the end of the evening one of the most exhilarating, experiences I actually ever had in terms of a corporate environment, in terms of opening its doors to a different community, and by the end of the evening there were conversations and hand gestures and shaking that I had never seen amongst our scientists and governors before. So from my perspective not only can one perhaps take it into science centers, but take it into other environments again and break down differences and try to generate understanding between different communities.
Graham Farmelo
Even in the boardroom?
Clare Matterson
Even in the boardroom.
Audience
One of the comments you made was what do scientists get out of this collaboration and that struck me being a scientist myself. I think that we lose the perspective, and I’ve always been struck by the idea that creative people need to create and that scientists, especially those of us with universities with extremely low budgets, have a tendency to be extremely creative and to find our resources in extraordinary places. And I think that we need to encourage the science community to identify that they are creative and to find that there are many ways to create and that piece of ourselves that we have to speak to. So that’s what science would get out of your creativity.
Graham Farmelo
Any comment on that?
Lavinia Greenlaw
I think that’s absolutely right to think of science as extraordinarily creative. You only have to read about how Einstein made his first steps towards relativity. And it was just dropping logic and thinking entirely as if no sense had ever been made of this thing. And I’m absolutely in awe of how scientists, just talking to my siblings, for instance, of the ability of their minds and the adaptiveness of their minds as well as the rigor. I think you’re right. I think the arts and science shouldn’t just be for public education. I think that scientists should have a chance to have that side of themselves re-invigorated through it.
Graham Farmelo
Did you want to comment, Clare Matterson?
Clare Matterson
I think what’s interesting if one sort of looks back through the ages is that actually the demarcations between disciplines increased. If you go back to some Leonardo, was he a scientist? Was he an artist? I don’t know that anyone could possibly say one way or the other. Once again I would agree. I think the artists, the scientists who have got involved, obviously there’s an openness and willingness to do so. Early on in the collaboration they said, "I did this because I had an interest "—not necessarily because they thought we would affect their work or affect them personally. What we have found through conversations and through more formal evaluations is that scientists are not saying it has had an immediate and direct impact on the way they may do experiment X. I think they’re being honest about that. But perhaps what it may have done is made them think about their work in a different way, and then perhaps potentially do their work in a different way in the future. And it’s hard to put one’s finger precisely on what that might mean, but I think it is certainly not the case that it is not having an impact on the scientists. But whether it has had a very instrumental impact-- "We did this and I changed my experiment like that "—I couldn’t claim that.
Lavinia Greenlaw
I’d like to just add to that the engagement with science has a profound effect on the poet. When I commissioned these poets for the book of medical poetry, several of the poems that came in came in with a note saying, "I’ve never written in this way before. "
Graham Farmelo
Thank you. Lady here, please.
Audience
One observation and a question. When I was in research—and I was in astrophysics—we actually had a fair number who were also musicians, singers, guitar players, whatever. We also were on a university campus and you would often find us at lunchtime or the 2 o’clock colloquium going over to the music school for concerts or spending our lunch hours at the exhibits. But we hardly ever, in some of our public lectures, saw artists crossing the divide to come and hear science. It’s just an observation I wanted to make. The other question is, and maybe the other two people will also get to this, what about music?
Graham Farmelo
I was clear from the beginning saying we’re not exploring outside of this, but if you want to comment on music, by all means.
Lavinia Greenlaw
I think one of the things I wanted to ask you is, you said people didn’t come into the science, but was there science available to them at a level with which they could engage?
Audience
That’s a fair question. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn’t. Even in the public lectures. There would be public lecture series in the evenings. There were always more scientists than those I would perceive to be artists, and I found it interesting because when I was teaching I did have art students in what we called "Rocks for Jocks " and "Stars for Poets " and things like that and I would bring up the question, "Did you ever study the chemistry behind the paints you’re using or the chalk you’re using? " And it was always like a new idea.
Graham Farmelo
This is the last question for now and then we’ll come back.
Audience
Thank you very much. This question was actually sparked by the introduction. You had mentioned Michael Crichton, and in many of his works and many other works of literature and film, scientists are often the bad guys. And as people do remember stories and novels and fantasy much more than they remember hard news, how do you deal with or how do we deal with the fact that in many cases of art, literature, and film, scientists are evil?
Graham Farmelo
With contempt. That’s flippant. You’re right. It’s a difficult question to answer thoroughly. I think it fair to say that there has been a stereotype of the Doctor Frankenstein as scientist. But in my view the Hollywood scientist, as I see in Hollywood movies anyway, is more likely to be a regular person than would have been the case twenty or thirty years ago. Think of Jodie Foster in Contact. There are many other examples. They lead a life. They’re not necessarily evil. I think obviously one must oppose a stereotype, because it’s patently not true, that all scientists are evil. Some might be, even roughly the same proportion as everybody else. Scientists are human beings. But let’s get away from the stereotype. I don’t think we should get too hung up on it, unless we become unfairly labeled. We better move on, if you don’t mind. We’ll come back at the end for more questions.
Now Catherine Hughes, followed by Alan Lightman.
Catherine Hughes [performing]
[Singing]
"Come on along. Come on along to Alexander’s Ragtime [end singing]—Ah. Human beings. You are my favorite species. Have you seen me in the new "Titanic " movie? I’m playing the third crab from the left on the first class promenade. The one with the colorful claws. They asked me to be in the movie because I know more about the Titanic than any creature alive. They may have picked over the facts, but I picked over the real thing. Ask me anything about the Titanic. Go ahead, anything? The name of John Jacob Aster’s dog, Kitty. The Christian name of the unsinkable Molly Brown, Margaret. Or my favorite, which of the Titanic four smokestacks was fake? The fourth one. They made a fake just to make the ship look more impressive. Vanity, vanity. That’s why we crabs are just as obsessed with the Titanic as you are. We consider it a laboratory for the study of the human mind. After all this is not just any old hulk. The name Titanic has become synonymous with fate’s fickle hand. "Moving the deck chairs around the Titanic " has become an expression of the ultimate in absurdity. This shipwreck has become a legend. [singing] "Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue. They thought they had a ship that the water couldn’t get through. It was on its maiden trip that an iceberg hit that ship. It was sad when that great ship went down. Everybody. " [end singing]. I’m kidding. The fact is even our kids know the story.
[Bell ringing]
April 14, 1912, Fred Fleet up on the crow’s nest. It was a crystal clear night on the north Atlantic. Not a moon in the sky. Not a swell in the sea. Not a breath of wind. Only a billion eyes of god twinkling from the dome of heaven. I have my eagle eyes peeled for icebergs. I know there might be icebergs because the water temperature has dropped and numerous reports have come in over the Marconi citing ice in the area. Unfortunately most of those reports have not gotten through to Captain Smith. You see the new technology of radio has not caught up with practices at sea and the wireless operator, Jack Phillips, knows nothing of navigation and has the same status on board as a bellboy or a steward. On this night he is busy—I am busy. Sending messages from the passengers—messages from the passengers about their arrival. About their arrival. A nearby ship breaks in over the wireless. "Say, old man. We’re stopped and surrounded by ice. " Phillips replies. "Shut up. Shut up. I am busy working Cape Race. " What was the important message that he was sending to Cape Race? "Your aunt and her entourage docking at fourteen hundred hours. Meet with carriages. "
If Phillips had been capable of putting all the messages from the other ships together, he could have told the captain that dead ahead of him lay a huge impenetrable ice flow.
[Bell ringing]
11:30 PM, Fred Fleet up in the crow’s nest. I can feel the hum of the Titanic’s three giant turbines propelling the ship full speed ahead. We’re going full speed ahead despite the ice warnings because well, the night is clear and the ship is sound. My company, the White Star Lline done everything for safety sake constructed out of the toughest steel plates with sixteen water tight bulkheads, rising ten feet above the water line. This ship is virtually unsinkable. Not.
If they had wanted to make a ship that was unsinkable, they probably could have. Fifty years earlier they had built a boat that was sure to float. Yes. She was called the Great Eastern. She had a double hull. She was like a ship inside a ship with water tight bulkheads rising up not ten feet but thirty feet above the water line. Unfortunately the Great Eastern was considered by one and all to be a floating tea kettle. She was a clunker. Unacceptable. " [Bell ringing]
This was the age of steam. The Atlantic crossing had been cut down to almost a week and the race was on for domination of the lucrative passage of trade, and engineers had to strike a balancing between speed, beauty, cost, safety. The Germans were building boats for speed. The White Star Line opted for safety. And luxury.
And that is where I will end this piece. (performance ends)
That was the beginning of a twenty-minute play called Unsinkable, Unthinkable by John Lipsky that has been performed at the Museum of Science in Boston, initially in conjunction with the Titanic movie in our IMAX theater. Once after I performed the entirety of this play, which is about the Titanic and the implications of a technology theory that says as we progress we should expect more rather than fewer disasters, an older Italian visitor, a gentleman, walked up to me, shaking a finger in my face, and he said, "You, you are working magic. You are asking questions that you should not ask. " Well, though I was a bit surprised at his vigorous accusation, I followed him as he took my arm, and we walked outside of the theater into the open exhibition hall where he indicated with his arms, "Look, look what we have done. We have put a man on the moon, " and I responded, "You’re right. Out here we celebrate what we have done, the scientific achievements that we have made. But in there, in the theater, we can question them. " While I recognize museums as places of reverence and recognition, my work within them was to encourage dialogue and debate.
I use this anecdote to illustrate one of the central tenets of the notion of using theater in a museum to educate about science. Theater provides a forum to explore complex and often difficult ideas in ways which challenge visitors and often provoke emotional responses. I want to thank Graham for inviting me to talk about this subject, very near and dear to my heart, something I have been studying for many, many years, and there are several different ways in which I want to connect science and theater in this presentation. First, obviously, as is the case in science museums, I want to talk about how science can serve as a pedagogic challenge. Second, how scientific research can, in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, support the connection between science and theater. Third, is how science acts as a source of inspiration for theater. Let me address this last area first and move it along.
In the last decade, to much acclaim, more and more playwrights in mainstream theater have been inspired by science and scientific endeavors which have shaped their art, producing such popular plays as mentioned already, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, QED by Peter Parnell, Arthur Giron’s Moving Bodies, and The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem. This may seem an odd new trend, but it’s not completely new. Many years before, Brecht explored the life of Galileo, and Durrenmatt wrote The Physicist. Since Aristotle, science has occasionally inspired play writing and we are now in one of those occasional times. The implications of cloning, genetically modified food, DNA sequencing and black holes provide ample dramatic fodder which has even inspired some scientists to try their hand at playwriting.
Science and theater have formed a symbiotic relationship. The science needs theater to deconstruct and humanize it. And theater needs science for relevance and for metaphor in my mind. There are two aspects to this latest trend of science theater that separate it from earlier times. First is the attempt, and in many cases the success of tackling head on truly difficult scientific content such as quantum physics, with consummate theatric technique. The second is the generation of science theater through collaborative non-profit initiatives. The science and technology project in New York City funded by the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation and operated by the Ensemble Studio theater started in 1998, and it was designated to stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and challenging the existing stereotypes. This addresses somebody’s question of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination. This project has spawned numerous successful plays about science that have been produced all over the United States.
Recently in the Boston area, a multi-year collaboration began between MIT and the Underground Railway Theater is dedicated to developing new plays about science called the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT. And a stage adaptation of my fellow panelist Alan Lightman’s novel, Einstein’s Dreams, was preformed to kick off this collaborative. MIT has been on the vanguard institutionally, providing support and forums to explore the connections between science and theater. In fact, I harbor the distinct fear that Dr. Lightman might be able to tell you a lot more about science in theater than me.
Nonetheless, it has been my work in science museums that has forged my thinking, which I’ll turn to here. This mainstream movement using science for artistic inspiration was preceded somewhat by the use of theater for science education. This was a worldwide movement evidenced by such efforts as the government of India’s nationwide program on communicating science and technology through puppetry and such work as the Barcelona Group Science Theater, which transmits scientific concepts by drawing on the emotions by means of theatrical characters and/or situations.
Too numerous to mention are myriad science theater companies producing plays in the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and other places. And in science museums, theater has found a solid base. Science museum staff in many parts of the world began to realize in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in order to engage more visitors in science or the objects of science or the beauty of science, that they would have to utilize a new set of tools—theatrical tools such as characters, music, lights, sound narrative, and emotion—and to enlist successful communicators such as playwrights. One question for this way of connecting science and theater is how theater can work as a learning tool for science. That question may appear to put theater in the servant position to the master, science, which is a common assumption about science theater, that the art will suffer for its connection, its service to science. However, I believe that to be an empty charge. It can certainly happen that bad theater is created from this proposition. We’ve all seen bad theater created for any number of reasons, and I don’t think we can blame it on science education.
Finally, the last connection I want to make is the one between science and theater and research and how research can support and inform it. There are two different areas of research where I see support. Both concern emotional response. First, psychological and neuroscience studies show evidence connecting emotional arousal and enhanced memory. People often are more likely to remember emotional information than to remember information lacking in emotional import, and that is just part of our physiology. When humans have an emotional reaction to a stimulus, our amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, is stimulated. Through the work of McGaugh, Cahill, and Rosendahl, and others, the memory modulations theoretical framework was developed which predicts that the amygdala should enhance long-term memory formation through modulation of hippocampus activity for emotionally arousing stimuli but not for emotionally neutral stimuli. The message seems commonsensical, but here is powered by scientific research.
Let’s get emotional about science. I’m going to take a step back from neuroscience and cognitive psychology and talk about the science museum work that we did, because I feel that this area is really important, reaching people who would never ever see theater and are often intimidated by science. We have here rising to the challenge of science theater playwrights who can and do create powerful pieces of drama that draw visitors out of themselves for a moment, ignite their imagination, transport them to different worlds and provoke them to rethink naïve notions and bring into focus what had merely been vapor and even make them laugh. I’m talking about affective and cognitive learning here. For example, visitors attending a play at the Museum of Science on the social and ethical implications of the human genome project were confronted with the question, What is normal in a human being, and who is going to decide what is normal? When it was first performed, an evaluation revealed that a majority of visitors had no idea what the human genome project was and therefore hadn’t ever contemplated these questions. Later Black and Goodowsky in a study of high school student responses to this play suggested that students found the play useful for learning because the play is based on real life and an everyday setting and uses everyday language, which made the topic presented easier to understand.
Theater provides context for science, placing it in the human domain and making it relevant. And this is one student’s articulation of this idea. "The actors, they use regular everyday situations and they talk casually. It’s not like in presentations where you have to spew out a bunch of information that people don’t even understand. I guess that is what makes an audience kind of bored, but in a play that brings them in. "
In preliminary analysis of my dissertation research, I’m finding that visitors remember a science theater performance through narrative cues. In particular, they begin by establishing the characters which moves them to remember further specifics. However, the most detailed accounts provided in telephone interviews three to five months after a museum visit have been those that include an emotional aspect about either the style or the content of the performance. People mention their surprise, awe, involvement, and amazement. They’re impressed by the theatrical form, although many declare themselves non-theater goers. One visitor described how the form assisted her understanding and lent an emotional quality.
Let’s get this quote up here. "I like the one person. She was acting as the captain. She talked as if she was him. Then she would change to something else. Like a passenger. This made it clear for me. I remember when they were trying to get on the lifeboats. I remember her face and her body. It was kind of neat the way she could give you a feeling about it, better than being read a story. " You wouldn’t think that with one person. There’s a process of translation that occurs when theater approaches science that allows for footholds to be gained by the public. These footholds might be an emotional connection, a narrative structure, cultural references, visual images or a song. They provide access for a variety of learners and, put in larger terms, people can learn through theater kinesthetically, linguistically, intrapersonally, interpersonally, and spiritually.
There is little difference between the theater done in science museums and that done in mainstream theater. Both are precarious balancing acts weighing the needs of science and the needs of theater. The biggest differences are just in the venue and in the length. For each new discovery in science, each new avenue opened, mystery explored, or new question posed, theater is available to translate, problematize, contextualize, or humanize. Or, in the words of visitors, to make it more real. I am hopeful for and wish to encourage an increase in collaboration between mainstream theater efforts and those in science museums, which willingly strengthen the impact and power of science theater. It is vital that theater’s contributions to the public understanding of science be recognized. Thank you.
Alan Lightman
Those are three very tough acts to follow. Literally. I want to thank Graham Farmelo for inviting me to come today, and I just love the whole idea of this conference. Ever since I was a young boy, I’ve had my passions divided between art and science. I’ve managed to make a life in both, as a physicist and a novelist, and to have lived in those two different communities. It’s been a great good fortune for me. I wanted to tell you this morning a little bit about what I’ve learned about the different ways that scientists and artists view the world, and also many of the similarities.
A big distinction that I’ve found between physicists and novelists—or I might say between scientists and artists in general—is in what one might call the naming of things. Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things and the artist tries to avoid naming things.
To name a thing, you’ve gathered it, you’ve distilled it, you’ve clarified it. You’ve tried to identify it with precision. You’ve put a box around the thing and said what’s in the box is a thing and what’s not is not. For example, consider the word electron, which you all know is a type of subatomic particle. And as far as we know, all of the zillions of electrons in the universe are identical. There’s only a single kind of electron. And it is described by a particular equation called the Dirac equation. That equation summarizes in a very precise, quantitative form everything that we know about electrons—every deflection of an electron in an electric or magnetic field, the precise energies of electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom, and so on.
All of that can be predicted to many decimal places with the Dirac equation. And in a real sense, the word electron refers to that equation. Every physical object in the universe, the scientist wants to express with this kind of precision. To a scientist, it is a great comfort, a sense of control, and a feeling of power to be able to name things in this way.
By contrast, the objects that the novelist deals with cannot be named. The novelist might use a word like love or fear, but those names don’t summarize or convey much to the reader. For one thing, there are a thousand different kinds of love. There’s the love that you feel for a mother who writes you every day your first summer away from home at summer camp. There’s the love that you feel for a mother who slaps you when you come home from the prom drunk, and then embraces you. There is the love that you feel for a man or a woman that you’ve just made love to. There is the love that you feel for a friend who calls you up for comfort just after you’ve split up from your spouse. And on and on.
But it’s not just the different kinds of love that prevent the novelist from truly naming the thing. It’s that the sensation of love, the particular sensation out of the many different kinds of love, must be shown to the reader. Not named, but shown through the actions of characters. And if love is shown, rather than named, then each reader will experience it and will experience it in her own individual way. Each reader will draw from her own adventures and misadventures with love. Love means one thing to one person and a different thing to another person. Every electron is identical, but every love is different.
The novelist doesn’t want to try to eliminate these differences, doesn’t want to try to distill the meaning of love to a single word so that there’s only a single meaning, as in the Dirac equation, because any such distillation is doomed to failure. And even an attempt at such a distillation would destroy that marvelous magical thing that happens when a reader reads a book and participates in the creative experience. In a sense, a novel is not completed until it is read by a reader. And every reader completes the novel in a different way. And I would say the same for poems and any other work of art.
There’s a pattern of thinking that’s closely related to naming, and that’s the tradition of framing problems in terms of questions and answers. As you know, we scientists usually work by taking a problem and stating it so that it has a definite answer. Or breaking it up into a smaller number of pieces, each of which has a definite answer. In fact, much of the game of science—even though science is constantly revising itself—is to pose questions in such a form that they have definite answers. It might take a year or ten years to find the answer, but that’s the way that you think in terms of questions and answers. For example, a typical scientific problem would be—I know we have some astrophysicists in the audience—how does a star change with time. And one part of this problem would be what is the structure of a star, of a given chemical composition and density. Another would be what is the rate of nuclear reactions at the center of the star at a given temperature and density, and so on. And these are all very well-posed problems that have definite answers. We scientists are taught from an early stage of our apprenticeship—and I was certainly taught this as a graduate student in physics—not to waste time on problems that do not have definite answers.
But artists often don’t care what the answer is, because definite answers often don’t exist. Ideas in a novel or a painting are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. Or ideas on the stage. For example, Copenhagen. Indeed, the exquisite contradictions of human nature really are, in my view, what make life worth living. For artists, there are many interesting questions that don’t have answers. Like what is love or what is the nature of God. Or would we be happier if we lived to be a thousand years old. In fact, for many artists, the question is more important than the answer. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a century ago, speaking to a young man who wanted to be a poet, we should learn to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or like books written in a very foreign tongue. Over the course of the years that I have lived in both the scientific and artistic communities, I have come to realize that we need both kinds of questions. We need questions with answers and we need questions without answers. Both kinds of questions are part of being human.
Now, I want to say something about the substantial common ground of the scientist and the artist. The folklore is that novelists make up everything and scientists make up nothing. Both of those views are false. As you know very well, creative imagination and inventiveness have always been hallmarks of good scientists, just as those qualities have been hallmarks of good artists. And on the flip side of the coin, novelists and artists must conform to a certain body of emotional truth.
Theoretical physicists, especially, work in a world of the mind. And I use that just as an example because that has been my field of science. We work in a world of the mind, an abstract mathematical world where physical reality is represented by simple models or equations that can be written down on a piece of paper.
Einstein often emphasized the importance of what he called "the free invention of the mind. " Einstein believed that we cannot arrive at the truth of nature just by observation and experiment. That rather, we have to start from concepts in our mind—imaginative concepts—and then explore the consequences of those concepts, and then only later test them against experiment. One of the best illustrations of Einstein’s "free invention of the mind " was his work on the special theory of relativity, which we’ve heard mentioned at least once this morning. And there, Einstein started off his thinking with the outrageous postulate that the speed of a light ray is the same, whether you are running towards the light ray or moving away from it. It passes you at the same speed—which totally contradicts all common sense. But Einstein realized that maybe our common sense is wrong when it comes to very, very high speeds, and he made an intuitive leap of imagination with this hypothesis.
Of course, scientists can’t make up everything, even when they’re inventing new theories, because there is a huge body of known facts about nature that a scientist has to conform to. You can’t have a theory in science where apples fall up instead of down. Richard Feynman, who was on my thesis committee at Caltech, put it very well in his little book, The Character of Physical Law—that in science we need imagination, but imagination and a terrible straightjacket.
But what is the straightjacket of the novelist? I would argue that it is the large catalogue of known behavior and psychology of Homo sapiens, a catalogue that we sometimes call human nature. Human nature represents the facts of emotional truth that the novelist must live by. If I had time, I would describe the dramatic scenes from a number of novels and ask you what happens next. What does the character do next in each of these scenes? Some possibilities would be totally ruled out by your knowledge of human nature and your own life experiences. And the others would seem very plausible to you.
I think both the novelist and the scientist are seeking truth. For the novelist, truth in the world of the mind and the heart, and for the scientist, truth in the world of mass and force. In seeking truth, both the novelist and the physicist must invent. Both kinds of invention are important. Both ultimately must be tested against experiment. The tests in science are more objective and final. No matter how beautiful a scientific theory is, it has this terrible vulnerability that it can be proven wrong. The characters or story in a novel cannot be proven wrong, but they can ring false to the reader and thus lose their power. And in this way, the novelist is constantly testing his creations against the life experience of readers.
There’s another experience that the scientist and the artist share, a really extraordinary experience. And that is the creative moment. I write in two places. One place is a house on a hill on an island in Maine. From my writing desk I can look out of my window and I can see osprey nests. I can see the ocean. I can see a pine-needle path that wanders down the hill to the water. The other place that I write is a large closet off the garage of my home in Concord, Massachusetts, not too far from here. It’s a room that has no windows. When I look up from my writing desk I see only a plaster wall. Both of these places have served me equally well as a writer, because after about twenty minutes I have become completely lost in this imaginative world that I am trying to create. I lose all track of myself and my surroundings. I lose track of time. I lose track of my ego.
I have had a very similar experience as a scientist. And I wanted to say a few words about the creative experience in science, because I find that while painters and actors and writers have described their creative experience in great detail, scientists rarely do. It’s a whole different lecture about why scientists don’t talk about their creative experience very much. But my first creative experience in science happened when I was a graduate student, and I had been struggling with the problem for about three or four months. It was a theoretical problem, so I was just using pencil and paper, and I was hitting a wall. I knew that I had made a mistake, but I didn’t know where the mistake was. I kept going back through my equations, day after day, and I couldn’t find my error. I began wondering whether I really had what it took to be a scientist.
Then one morning at about 5:00 a.m., I woke up and I felt this strange thing going on in my head. The sensation was that my head was lifting off my shoulders. And I found myself thinking about my science problem, in a way that I had never thought about it before. I wasn’t going from one equation to the next, I was thinking in a larger, holistic way. And I tiptoed out of my bedroom into the kitchen where my crumpled pages of calculations from the last six months were lying on the kitchen table. A little light was just beginning to come in through the window by this time, and I sat down at the table with my equations, and I began working.
I began seeing the problem very deeply. I had no sensation of my body, but I did have a feeling of being alone with the problem. And I think that being alone with a problem is a universal aspect of creativity; that you are alone with whatever it is you’re working on. I know that poets are certainly alone. After a while sitting at the kitchen table, I had solved my thesis problem. I stood up and walked out of the kitchen feeling stunned and powerful. And then I heard a noise and looked up on the wall and saw a clock, and it was 5:00 p.m. in the afternoon.
The scientists and artists that I have known have at least one more thing in common. They do what they do because they love it and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. This compulsion is both a blessing and a burden. It’s a blessing because the creative life is a beautiful life and is not given to everyone. But it’s also a burden because when the call comes, it can be unrelenting and it can drown out the rest of life. This mixed blessing and burden must be what the poet Walt Whitman referred to as a "sweet hell. " When he realized at a young age that he was destined to be a poet he said, "Never more shall I escape. " This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued to work on astrophysics until his eighties. Or why a visitor to the young Einstein’s apartment in Berne found the young physicist rocking the cradle of his son with one hand and doing mathematical calculations with the other.
The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Barbara McClintock once described her passion for doing science in this way: "I was just so interested in what I was doing that I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and get at it. One of my friends said that I was a child because only children can’t wait to get up in the morning.
Graham Farmelo
Thank you, Alan. Thank you, Catherine. Now, there are so many things we could ask the previous two distinguished speakers. I don’t want to run too far behind. They are available to speak to afterwards. But it would be nice to take a couple of brief questions now if we could. A question here, please.
Audience
Thank you all for those wonderful presentations. I guess my question is directed toward Catherine, but to some extent all of you. And that is that you kept talking about the use of theater, which I fully understand and appreciate, but it was professionals who are creating the theater for other people to watch. And what I’m wondering is what is the power, because I’ve experienced this a little bit in a project that I did a number of years ago, in having children create theater. And based upon—it was called science on stage. And what we had students do was to actually learn about a topic in science and create a play about it, and then perform it at the college where I worked. And it was a very, very powerful way of getting them engaged, getting them to think about things, and also for teachers and others to be able to see how it is that they were thinking about the topic.
Catherine Hughes
You’re right. It was not an area that I could address in this presentation. That’s sort of my other life. I teach a course at OSU called "Teaching and Learning With Drama. " And it’s all about teaching—I teach pre-service teachers to incorporate drama into all the curriculum, science, history, anything. And there is an enormous amount of literature that supports the idea that children can learn better about science through drama.
Graham Farmelo
Any question for Alan please, specifically? Oh, yes. I beg your pardon. I didn’t see you.
Audience
Hi. I’m an exhibit developer, so I work with groups of people, trying to create something that’s both creative and fun, but also conveys science. And I was just struck by this issue of someone being alone with a problem and having that ah-ha moment and being sucked in by the world that you’re creating alone. And I’ve certainly had that experience. But I’ve also had the experience where all of us collectively get sucked into that. And you literally don’t know where the idea came from and how it altered, but somehow a group of us get into that zone together. And I’m wondering, that’s certainly not your experience in those two areas. I don’t know even know who this question is for, but it just struck me that somehow it feels the same. You still have that somewhat out of body experience but there are other people sucked in at the same time and it is—it’s a different creative process, and the idea wouldn’t have arisen out of any one brain.
Catherine Hughes
I think we’re talking about socio-cultural learning there. And I think what you’re talking about is more cognitive happening within the self, and that is one aspect of creativity. But there is also this other aspect of socio-cultural theory where you’re creating it together.
Graham Farmelo
Alan, did you want to comment on that?
Alan Lightman
Well, I think the creative moment and experience is wonderful, whenever it happens. And I think when people are playing instruments in an orchestra, that there might be some of that same kind of thing going on, where it’s a group activity. So I think that the creative experience is so marvelous that any way that you can make it happen is a good thing. And I was just describing a particular experience.
Graham Farmelo
Just sneak in one last question. This gentleman here. If you could get the microphone please. If you could keep it brief, I’d be really grateful.
Audience
Thank you. This is directed to Ms. Hughes. And the quote that you put up there about the students’ response to the difference in seeing something in theater versus the sort of dryness in scientific presentations. Just to set the stage, I used to run a private science foundation that in fact supported the production of theater, a play written by two scientists in fact, one of whom has gone on to write several more plays, one of which was produced in London recently and will be in New York. And both of those scientists and some other scientists whom I know give remarkably lucid scientific presentations that leave you with your jaw dropping, with an emotional reaction as well as an intellectual understanding of the science. And every one of them has some connection with the arts. Of the two that I mentioned, one has written novels and plays, the other one has written poetry. A third one that I’m thinking of is an extraordinarily accomplished pianist, classical pianist. So I’m wondering to what extent you think, or others may think, there’s a link between those two, in that the experience with the artistic side of them actually enhances the presentation of their scientific work. It just had to do with when one person mentioned the notion that there are scientists who are working in the arts, I almost detected a disparaging tone about that.
Catherine Hughes
I mentioned in my talk that scientists are writing about it. Some are being inspired to put their hand to pen and be playwrights themselves. So it’s just yet another avenue being explored. So the playwrights themselves are being inspired by science, but the scientists are being inspired to put their ideas to a play. I think that there is—I think as we all are pointing out that this connection between art and science is going to produce some amazing presentations in some way. And I have seen some very, very theatrical scientists, and they have been truly engaging. And I don’t think that’s who that boy was talking about when he thought about that.
Graham Farmelo
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for coming this morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve been looking at and exploring theater, prose, poetry, visual art. And I think you’ll agree our speakers have given us an awful lot of wonderful insights through their presentations here.