recognize the indifference or incompre-hension that creeps into the eyes of the lis-tener. You learn the art of self-deprecation,the art of crypsis, the art of blending,mouse-like into the background. Butbeneath your bland and neutral exterior,you create confections of fantasy”5.

Perhaps through the medium of this pas-sage the reader might live, for a few moments,some of those 16 years of obsession. Perhapshe might see the short, dumpy man walkingin the monastery garden and thinking overhis garden peas and what they might mean.This is not to miss the point of the science: it isthe point. Because, just as an artistic creationlives in the mind of its creator, so too does ascientific idea. We labour under the illusionthat discoveries and ideas lie somewhere outthere in nature — but in truth the science isin the discoverer’s head. The inheritedanlage was in Mendel’s mind, the uncertainparticle was in Heisenberg’s, the Universe isin Stephen Hawking’s. That is what makesthem so remarkable.There is little differencebetween this and artistic vision. Yes, you’vegot to do the experiments but that is not theessence of it. The essence is the idea and theenquiry. “What if ?” is the question posed inboth literature and science. What if theThane of Cawdor were to have an ambitiouswife and a fatal flaw in his disposition?What if a young Raskolnikov were toattempt the ultimate intellectual violence,the justification of murder? What if agrown man were to fall in love with apubescent girl? Or... what if a gravitationalfield were to create a curvature of the space-time continuum? What if electrons were tobe both wave and particle? What if Godreally were to play dice?

Darwin has brought us out of heaven anddown to earth and surely it is no surprise thatuncertainty — “that final core of uncertaintyat the heart of things”4 — permeates modernliterature and modern science alike. Theunreliable particle and the unreliable narra-tor are two sides of the same weirdly spinningcoin. And just as scientists employ thoughtexperiments to focus their ideas, so a work ofliterature is a thought experiment about thisuncertain human condition. ■

1. Nabokov, V. Speak, Memory (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London,

1967).

2. Updike, J. Couples (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968).

3. McEwan, I. Enduring Love (Jonathan Cape, London, 2001).

4. Frayn, M. Copenhagen (Methuen, London, 1998).

5. Mawer, S. Mendel’s Dwarf (Doubleday, London, 1997).

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In childhood, I wrote dozens of poems. Iexpressed in verse my questions about

death, my loneliness, my admiration for aplum-coloured sky and my unrequited lovefor 14-year-old girls. Reading, listening, eventhinking, I was mesmerized by the soundsand the movement of words. Words couldbe sharp or smooth, cool, silvery, prickly totouch, blaring like a trumpet call, fluid,pitter-pattered in rhythm. And, by magic,words could create emotions and scenes.When my grandfather died, I buried mygrief in writing a poem, which I showed tomy grandmother a month later. She cradledmy face with her veined hands and said, “It’sbeautiful,” and then began weeping all overagain. How could marks on a white sheet ofpaper contain such power and force?

Between poems, I did scientific experi-ments. These I conducted in the crampedlittle laboratory I had built out of a storagecloset in my house. In my homemadealchemist’s den, I horded resistors andcapacitors, coils of wire of various thick-nesses and grades, batteries, switches, pho-toelectric cells, magnets, dangerous chemi-cals, test tubes and Petri dishes, Bunsenburners. I loved to find out how thingsworked.

When my experiments went awry, I couldalways find certain fulfillment in mathe-matics. When my maths teachers assignedhomework, I relished the job. I would savemy maths problems for last, right beforebedtime — like bites of chocolate cake await-ing me after a long and dutiful meal of historyand Latin. Then I would devour my cake. Inalgebra, I loved the abstractions, letting ‘x’sand ‘y’s stand for the number of nickels in ajar or the height of a building in the distance.

A tale of two lovesThe arts and sciences provide complementary ways of looking at the world, argues Alan Lightman.

Alan Lightman is a physicist and adjunctprofessor of humanities at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology in Boston.He is the author of four novels, includingEinstein’s Dreams (1993), which has beenadapted for numerous theatrical andmusical productions. He has published twocollections of essays and six non-fictionbooks about physics and astronomy. Hislatest book, The Discoveries, about the greatscientific discoveries of the twentieth cen-tury, will be published by Pantheon Booksin November 2005 .

scientists on art

I loved solving a set of connected equations,one logical step after another. I loved theshining purity of mathematics, the logic, theprecision. I loved the certainty. With mathe-matics, you were guaranteed an answer, asclean and crisp as a new $20 bill. And whenyou had found that answer, you were right,unquestionably right. The area of a circle isπr2.Period.

Mathematics and science contrastedstrongly with the ambiguities and contradic-tions of people. The world of people had nocertainty or logic. People confused me. MyAunt Jean continued to drive recklessly and

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and Francis Crick have all changed our viewof the world and our place in it.

Then, there is the portrayal of the scien-tist. By now, it is well known that the pictureof the scientist as the eccentric personalitywithout human feeling, pursuing truth bythe numbers, wearing sterile gloves at all

times, is false. But the particularway that a person trained in log-ical thinking must negotiate hisor her way through the illogicalworld of human passions —that is a subject worthy of art.

The arts and humanities, inturn,offer the sciences an essen-tial store of other ideas, images,metaphors and language. These

connections are often subtle. For his highlynon-intuitive postulates of relativity, Einsteinpartly credited the philosopher DavidHume’s notion that the truths of nature can-not always be arrived at by experiment but

sometimes must originate in the mind. Thegreat atomic physicist Niels Bohr comparedthe invisible nucleus of an atom to an oscillat-ing drop of liquid. Modern string theoristsdescribe the hypothesized smallest con-stituents of matter and energy, which willprobably never be seen by the most powerfulinstruments, as ‘vibrating strings’ that‘stretch’and ‘break’and ‘merge’. Such images,metaphors and vocabulary arise both fromdirect sensual experience and from the lan-guage of artists and humanists who portraythat experience. Scientists, in turn, must usethe same language to describe their extremeworlds, far beyond sensual experience,because no alternative exists except for math-ematical equations.

It seems to me that the most importantgift the sciences and the arts have to offereach other is a recognition and synthesis oftheir different approaches to thinking, theirdifferent ways of being in the world. Whenthese differences come together, oftenuneasily, we witness the full complexity andthe mystery, and ultimately the grandeur, ofbeing human. What makes Michael Frayn’sCopenhagen so powerful, in part, is theunspoken contrast between the neat world ofatomic physics, where one can solve mathe-matical equations for wavefunctions and theneutron mean free paths, versus the world ofpolitics, war and ethical dilemmas. And inthe film A Beautiful Mind, the precision ofJohn Nash’s mathematical mind forms a dis-turbing counterpoint to the confusion in hishallucinatory illusions. When I was writingEinstein’s Dreams, I resisted the urge to makeeach dream world, with its own theory oftime, logically consistent. My Einstein, themost celebrated envoy of rational thought,was also a dreamer, a person of deep loneli-ness,struck with the frailties and urgencies ofthe human heart — indeed a scientist whomight have failed to achieve what he didwithout his sometimes irrational personalcommitments and passions.

Somehow, we human beings have a won-drous capacity for being both rational andirrational, detached and passionate, deliber-ate and spontaneous,craving of certainty anduncertainty, seeking questions with answersand questions without.We are a splattering ofcontradictions. In my own case, I have alwaysfelt these juxtapositions as a creative tensionnecessary for my work, a continual rumblingin my gut,an unsettled joy. ■

at great speed,even though everyone told hershe would kill herself.My Uncle Edwin askedme to do a mathematical calculation thatwould help him run the family business withmore efficiency, but when I showed him theresult he brushed it aside with disdain.Blanche, the dear woman who worked forour family, deserted her husband after heabused her and then talked about him withaffection for years.How does one make senseout of such actions and words?

A long time later,after I became a novelist,I realized that the ambiguities and complexi-ties of the human psyche are what give fiction,and perhaps all art, its power. A good novelgets under our skin, provokes us and hauntsus long after the first reading, preciselybecause we never fully understand the charac-ters. We sweep through the narrative overand over again, searching for meaning.Compelling characters must retain a certainmystery and unfathomable depth, even forthe author. Once we have seen to the bottomof their hearts, the novel is dead for us.

There are questions with answers andquestions without. Scientists work on ques-tions with answers. Although science is con-stantly revising itself in response to new ideasand data, at any moment each scientist isworking on what is called a ‘well-posedproblem’ — that is, a problem of such a kindand stated with such clarity that it is certain tohave a definite answer. That answer may taketen years to find, or a hundred, but an answerexists. By contrast, for artists the question isoften more interesting than the answer, andoften an answer doesn’t exist. How does oneanswer a question such as “What is love?” or“Would we be happier if we lived to be 1,000years old?” One of my favourite passagesfrom Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is this:“Weshould try to love the questionsthemselves, like locked roomsand like books that are writtenin a very foreign tongue.”

Science has much to offerthe arts.When Salman Rushdiespoke to an audience at theMassachusetts Institute ofTechnology in late 1993, hesaid:“Many of us writers of mygeneration have felt that in many ways thecutting edge of the new is to be found in thesciences.”Science has always been a source ofnew ideas,and artists thrive on ideas.NicolausCopernicus, Darwin, Einstein, James Watson

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artists on science

“We human beings havea wondrous capacity forbeing rational and irrational,detached andpassionate,deliberateand spontaneous,craving of certainty and uncertainty.”

Describing the indescribable: string theoristsuse the language of artists to portray thefundamental nature of the Universe. (Computerartwork representing superstrings.)

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