Voices from the Community
Where art and science meet
Celebrated physicist and novelist Dr. Alan Lightman discusses the overlap between the arts and sciences.
Dr. Alan Lightman is one of a relatively small band of people who achieve excellence in both the sciences and the humanities in their working lives. Even as a young boy growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, his passions were divided equally between these two worlds. "As a child, I wrote a lot of poems. I was mesmerized by the sound and movement of words. As if by magic, words could create scenes and emotions. I also did scientific experiments in a cramped lab in a large bedroom closet. I collected equipment: test tubes, Petri dishes, flasks, batteries, photocells, resistors. I delighted in this equipment."
One of his fondest memories is of a rocket project he attempted at the age of 14. He built the rocket, developed his own rocket fuel, and crafted the ignition source from the flashbulb of a Brownie camera. From his thrust calculations, he expected the rocket to fly half a mile or so. On launch day, his audience consisted of his "constantly awed" younger brothers and an assortment of neighbourhood boys.
The launch went well; but after rising only a few hundred feet, the rocket crashed to earth. The tail fins had come off. "It was then, with a sudden clarity, that I realized that instead of riveting the tail fins, I had just glued them on because I decided the rivets were too ugly. I had sacrificed reality for aesthetics."
The episode of the rocket project was the first time Dr. Lightman's scientific and artistic inclinations collided, but far from the last. The constant tension between art and science in his own life is a source of his witty and insightful observations.
"Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things while the artist tries to avoid naming things. To name a thing, you must distill it, attempt to identify it with some kind of clarity and precision. Consider the word electron, a type of subatomic particle. As far as we know, all the zillions of electrons in the universe are identical. To a modern physicist, the word electron means a particular equation which summarizes everything we know about electrons.
"The objects and concepts the novelist deals with cannot be named. I might use a word like love, but it doesn't convey much to the reader. For one thing, there are a thousand different kinds of love. The novelist must also communicate the particular sensation of love. All this must be shown to the reader-not named, but shown through the actions of the characters. And if love is shown, then each reader will experience it in their own individual way. Love means one thing to one person, and a different thing to another.
"All electrons are identical, but every love is different. The novelist doesn't want to eliminate these differences-to try to clarify the meaning of love until there is only a single meaning. No such distillation would represent love."
Although the differences between scientists and artists are often striking, Dr. Lightman notes that there is also substantial common ground between the two. One area is the concept of truth. "The folklore is that novelists make up most of what they write about, and scientists make up nothing. Both views are false. Creative imagination and inventiveness have always been hallmarks of good scientists and good novelists."
And just as the scientist must agree with the body of known facts, so must the novelist. "The straitjacket of the novelist is the large catalogue of known behaviour and psychology of Homo sapiens-a catalogue we call human nature. These are the facts of emotional truth by which the novelist must live.
"Both the novelist and scientist are seeking truth. For the novelist, truth is in the mind and the heart. For the scientist, truth is in the world of mass and force."
Dr. Lightman argues that both ways of knowing are important. "Scientists work by finding problems and breaking them into smaller pieces, each of which has a definite answer. The artist often doesn't care what the answer is, because definitive answers don't often exist in the arts. The ideas in a novel or painting are complicated by the intrinsic ambiguities of human nature.
"I've come to learn that we need questions with answers and questions without answers. Both kinds of questions are part of being human."