曼無狂想地
曼舞飛絮的羈旅，小小的足跡漂泊在文字裏，隨心而來，隨緣而去，隨意而遊，隨喜而嬉，天地一痞。
科學的未來是，藝術？
作者丨JONAH LEHRER
譯者丨carrieshen
“我們是誰，一切事物是什麽，這是人類最深沉的問題。如果我們想知道答案，就需要同時借助科學和藝術。”
上世紀二十年代早期，丹麥物理學家Niels Bohr努力對物質的結構進行重新想象。從前的物理學家認為原子的內部空間看起來就像微型太陽係統，原子核是其中的太陽，快速移動的電子是軌道上的各個星球。這便是物理學中的經典模型。
不過Bohr仍對電子進行了研究，並意識到“科學”需要引申出新的含義。電子的表現似乎有悖於任何一種傳統解釋。如Bohr所講：“我們一提到原子，隻能用詩的語言來描述。”普通詞語無法盡意。
Bohr長久以來都迷戀立體派藝術家的畫作。他極具眼光地深信：電子所在的看不見的世界屬於立體派藝術家。到1923年，de Broglie已確認電子既可以是粒子形式，也可以是波的形式。Bohr堅持認為電子存在形式取決於我們如何看待這些電子。它們的根本性質等於人們的觀察結果。這意味著電子完全不像微小星球，而像畢加索解構後的吉他畫作，筆法模糊到仔細看才能看出端倪來。看上去如此奇怪的藝術其實訴說著真相。
丹麥物理學家Niels Bohr
人們很難相信一件抽象藝術作品實際上可能影響了科學史。立體派似與現代物理毫無共通之處。人們一想到科學進程，腦子裏就會立刻閃現出以下特定詞匯：客觀、實驗、真相。我們在科學論文的被動時態中想象真實世界的完美寫照。而畫作可以是深奧的，卻永遠佯裝淺顯。
將科學看作萬事萬物唯一的調解員是基於一條不成文的假設：藝術與時尚周而複始，而科學知識呈線性上升。科學史應遵從一個簡單的等式：時間加上數據等於理解。人們相信總有一天科學將擺平一切問題。
不過現實中的科學軌跡還要稍微複雜一點點。我們知道越多的現實，關於其悖論就越明顯。正如小說家、鱗翅類學者Vladimir Nabokov曾寫下的那樣：“掌握的科學知識越多，不可思議的感覺越深。”
上述表達適用於人類大多數基礎科學，比如物理學和神經科學。這兩種學科共同致力於解決一個最古老最宏大的未知提問：何為萬事萬物？我們是誰？
在我們能夠揭開這些謎團之前，科學必須擺脫自身的限製。如何做到這點呢？我的答案是:科學需要藝術。我們需在試驗期間為藝術家找一個位置，以重新發現Bohr看到那些立體派畫作時所觀察到的東西。科學的現存限製使人明白：雞尾酒會上因兩種文化的衝突而使雙方無法交談的案例並非僅僅是個學術問題，而是個現實問題。這樣的現實問題擋住了科學的各項理論。如果我們希望在最核心的問題上得出答案，則需要連接起文化鴻溝。
畢加索畫作《吉他與小提琴》
我們擁有了如此大量的物質知識，卻對物質創造出了什麽東西依然一無所知。我們了解突觸，卻不了解我們自身。事實上，簡化論的邏輯暗示出人類的自我意識其實是複雜的幻想，是額葉皮層內某些流電震動所產生的伴隨現象。機器中是沒有鬼魂的，隻有機械震動。你的大腦中有一千億個流電細胞，其中沒有一個是你，它們也不了解你、關心你。事實上，你甚至根本不存在。大腦什麽都不是，不過是物質的無窮化回歸，最終縮減至物理學無情的規律中。
該方法的問題在於它否認了真正需要解決的謎團。神經科學擅長於從下而上來解剖思想。但對人類自我意識的解剖似乎需要的是自上而下的方法。正如小說家Richard Powers寫下的那樣：“我們如果隻是通過突觸來認識世界，又怎能認識‘突觸’呢？”神經科學的悖論在於：其驚人的發展已暴露出自身範例的局限性，簡化論無法解答我們內心浮現的思想。它仍舊無法解釋人類的許多體驗。
神經科學的簡化法沒有將“我”置於萬物的中心位置，而是努力探尋感受性的問題。然而像Virginia Woolf這樣的藝術家們，幾世紀以來卻一直在研究此類現象，在思想的謎團方麵已積累了大量知識。這些人建造出人類意識的精簡模型來表達人類體驗的紋理，將現實生活的細節提煉成散文和故事情節。這就是為何他們的小說保持曆久彌新：因為內容感覺真實。為什麽？因為其捕獲到了現實層麵，而簡化論做不到。
如果神經係統科學家嚴肅對待這些藝術性的探索，便可更好理解自己試圖解析之事物的整體性能。將某件事物分離之前了解它的結合方式有助於完成這項工作。從這個意義上講，藝術是異常豐富的數據庫，使科學的盲點有看得見的可能。如果神經科學想要找尋意識的神經性關聯，或發現自我的來源，或找出主觀性細胞，如果這門學科想要超越人類皮層術語庫，那麽得與高層次精神方麵開展深入了解。這是當前科學所采用的方法所欠缺的。
Virginia Woolf
沉迷於鴉片的Samuel Taylor Coleridge早在精神方麵的學科形成前，就寫下關於“思考過程中思想的自我體驗”的詩歌。或者瞧瞧視覺藝術的世界吧。正如神經係統科學家Semir Zeki所注：“藝術家和畫家中有的是官能神經病學家，他們采用技術方法來研究大腦，這些技術對他們來說很特別。”莫奈的畫作《幹草垛》吸引我們，某種程度上是因為他對顏色的感覺理解到位。Jackson Pollock 的滴畫能引起強烈共鳴，是因為其刺激了視覺皮層某些特殊的細胞電路。這些畫家對大腦開展逆向操縱，結果發現了迷惑雙眼的視覺規律。
當然，科學的標準回應會說這類藝術對科學進程來說太過散亂。美麗反映不出真理，莫奈是因為運氣好。小說隻是虛構作品，與實驗性的事實背道而馳。這類藝術無法用圖表標繪出來，也無法壓縮成變量，因此不值得加以注意。但是，這樣的散亂難道不是人類思想的本質麽？我們的內在體驗難道不是充滿了跳躍性，全是不合邏輯的推論和莫名其妙的感覺？從這個意義上講，小說的零亂與畫作的抽象實際是一麵鏡子。正如詩歌評論家Randall Jarrell 所說：“藝術作品中包含矛盾，因此它們可以代表我們，代表這個同樣充滿矛盾的世界和我們自身，而邏輯化、係統化的概論無法實現這樣的功能。”
乍看之下，物理學似乎離藝術的主觀世界特別遙遠。其理論提取於各類晦澀的方程式和超級對撞機的亞原子碎片。這個學科在不斷地強調：我們對現實最基本的直覺其實是錯覺，是感覺的虛構。藝術家依賴於想象，但現代物理學超越了想象。天地間的事物多於人能想象出的事物，像暗物質、誇克和黑洞。麵對這般奇怪的宇宙隻能去發現，不能去感受。
莫奈畫作《幹草垛》
然而物理學的超現實主義性質正是其需要藝術家幫助的原因。這門學科的發展已超出我們的理解能力，至少其字麵意義超出了我們的理解能力。人類思想不可能理解弦理論的雙位維度，或平行宇宙的可能性。我們的思想植根於一個簡明的世界，在這兒，要緊的是確定性，時間永遠向前流動，隻存在三維空間。如果我們要超越這些固有的直覺，就隻能求助於隱喻。現代物理學的反諷之處在於：一方麵它試圖尋找現實的最基本形式，並用數學來表示，另一方麵我們卻對這些超越了數學的基礎完全無法理解。認識宇宙的唯一方法是借助類比。
因此，物理學的曆史充斥著跳躍性的類比。愛因斯坦在思考移動的火車時得出了“相對論”。Arthur Eddington將宇宙的膨脹比作一隻脹氣的氣球。James Clerk Maxwell將磁場想成是太空中的小漩渦，他稱之為“旋渦”。“大爆炸”隻是在宇宙中放了回鞭炮。 陷入宇宙煉獄的實驗——“薛定諤的貓”有助於解釋量子力學的悖論。若沒有“橡膠水管”的類比，“弦理論”將變得難以想象。
這些比喻可能太過簡化，但確實意義重大。隱喻的力量在於它可以讓科學家們透過具體事物想象抽象概念，這樣來領會出數學方程式的內在含義。這個我們所知的唯一世界圈定了人類的思維。
然而，借助隱喻也可能不安全，因為所有的隱喻都不完美。如Thomas Pynchon所說：“隱喻與真相背道而馳，隱喻是謊話。”存在於宇宙的弦可能的確像是橡膠水管，但也隻是相像而已。太空也不是塑料球。理論一旦和平常話語相連，方程式的純正便受到了汙染。借助類比來思考，就像行走在“準確”的懸崖邊上。
薛定諤的貓
這便是現代物理需要藝術的原因。一旦接受“隱喻對科學進程很重要”的觀點，我們就可以想一想怎麽讓這些隱喻變得更好。詩人當然屬隱喻高手，他們的藝術力量在於將各種含義壓縮進韻律，他們還將模糊的感覺轉化成生動的描繪。20世紀許多最偉大的物理學家皆因其清晰而浪漫的思維方式而聞名，如愛因斯坦、 費曼、玻爾這樣的傑出人士。這可不是巧合，這些偉大的科學家借用隱喻看到了他人永遠無法看到的事物，所以有了用鐵路比喻相對論，用液體的下落比喻原子核。詩人能幫助物理學家創造新隱喻，改進舊隱喻，以此推動本學科的發展速度。也許我們能創造出比“橡膠水管”更好的比喻。也許明喻將有助於我們解開暗物質的謎團。正如研究“弦理論”的專家Brian Greene最近所寫的那樣，藝術有能力“強勢顛覆我們對真實的固有判斷”，促使科學想象力的觸角延伸至新的事物。
然而，藝術家還可以為宇宙對話提供另外一種途徑：在他們的幫助下，科學隱喻可以變得有形有狀。如將抽象方程式變成實體，物理學家便可以從全新的角度探索數學的意義。畢加索通過時代思潮運用的幾何學遠非歐幾裏德式的，他永遠理解不了那些方程式，卻堅決用畫作來表現這種思考空間的新方式。一個世紀之後，物理學家仍將他作品中那些破碎的靜物作為科學的有力符號。抽象藝術使我們理解了那些難以理解的事物，哪怕隻有一點點。
藝術家同樣可以讓神經科學受益。小說家的作品可以催生有關意識的最新理論。如果理論無法賦予各類性格真實的感覺，那麽理論本身很可能也不真實。舉個例子，Woolf是早期研究弗洛伊德理論的評論家，她否決了那種將自己“各種性格劃成案例”的方式。畫家可以探究視覺皮層的全新理論。舞蹈家可以幫忙解開身體與情感之間的神秘紐帶。科學通過對藝術智慧的關注，來與藝術互相交流，也可加入進藝術的全部領域。另一方麵，要想理解科學思想和理論，藝術也向科學提供了一麵鏡子，通過它科學可以審視自我。
C.P. Snow
散文作家C.P. Snow新創過“兩種文化”的思想，他為解決不同文化而提出了一個簡單的解決辦法。他論述說，我們需要“第三種文化”，以縮短科學家和藝術家之間的“交流隔閡”。他說，通過互相理解，雙方都將受益，因為作家可因此而了解熱力學的第二法則，而科學家也因此而閱讀到了莎士比亞的作品。
如今的確有新生的第三種文化，卻偏離Snow所持的觀點。他所說的第三種文化基於互動，而實際的第三種文化，基本上就是說科學家直接向公眾談話。當然，科學家們切斷“中間人”，並向公眾解釋他們的研究，這樣的做法是很有意義的。實踐這種第三種文化的大量科學家大大提升了公眾對先鋒派科學的理解。
但是科學與藝術之間的協作到底指什麽？如果我們真想聯合人類的各類知識，那就需要創造一種新運動。這種新運動能與第三種文化和諧共處，同時又能刻意跨越文化邊界，試圖將藝術和科學聯係起來。運動的前提是：藝術與科學這兩種文化均無法孤立存在。運動的目標是：創造一種積極的反饋環路，讓藝術作品引導新的科學實驗，科學實驗引導新的藝術作品，如此等等。科學和藝術要真正地彼此影響，而不是采用膚淺幼稚的方式彼此忽略、競爭或挑選。
現代科學無法單獨解答其必須解答的宏大問題。融合兩種文化可以使我們通過有用性來判斷我們的知識，而非通過其起源。這兩種現存的文化必須調整自身的習慣。首先，人文學科必須與科學真誠合作。藝術家必須聽從自己內心的聲音，同時也要重視科學對現實那激動人心的描述。
其次，科學必須認識到自己的真實並非唯一的真實。沒有哪個知識領域壟斷得了整個知識。正如Karl Popper這位科學的擁護者所寫：“放棄‘知識的終極來源’這種想法，承認所有的知識都是以人為本，這點很重要；承認知識混合了我們的失誤、偏見、夢想和希望；承認我們所能做的就是探索真相，即使其超出我們的能力範圍。”追尋科學真相的過程既漫長又艱苦，而且永無止境。我們是誰，一切事物是什麽，這是人類最深沉的問題，如果我們想知道答案，就需要同時借助科學和藝術，這樣一來兩者才能互為補充。
In the early 1920s, Niels Bohr was struggling to reimagine the structure of matter. Previous generations of physicists had thought the inner space of an atom looked like a miniature solar system with the atomic nucleus as the sun and the whirring electrons as planets in orbit. This was the classical model.
But Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” Ordinary words couldn’t capture the data.
Bohr had long been fascinated by cubist paintings. As the intellectual historian Arthur Miller notes, he later filled his study with abstract still lifes and enjoyed explaining his interpretation of the art to visitors. For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object. The art revealed the fissures in everything, turning the solidity of matter into a surreal blur.
Black Peacock, 1950
ALEXANDER CALDER
This mobile is a powerful example of how an art form can be tailored to the physiology of a specific area in the brain. Calder’s composition anticipated, artistically, the physiological properties of the cells of an area called V5, which are selectively responsive to motion and its direction. Viewed from a distance, the separate pieces of the mobile appear as static spots of varying sizes. But as the pieces move in different directions, each one stimulates only the category of cell that is selectively responsive to the direction in which the spot is moving. —Semir Zeki, Neuroscientist, University College London © Christie’s Images/Corbis
Bohr’s discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons could exist as either particles or waves. What Bohr maintained was that the form they took depended on how you looked at them. Their very nature was a consequence of our observation. This meant that electrons weren’t like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.
It’s hard to believe that a work of abstract art might have actually affected the history of science. Cubism seems to have nothing in common with modern physics. When we think about the scientific process, a specific vocabulary comes to mind: objectivity, experiments, facts. In the passive tense of the scientific paper, we imagine a perfect reflection of the real world. Paintings can be profound, but they are always pretend.
This view of science as the sole mediator of everything depends upon one unstated assumption: While art cycles with the fashions, scientific knowledge is a linear ascent. The history of science is supposed to obey a simple equation: Time plus data equals understanding. One day, we believe, science will solve everything.
But the trajectory of science has proven to be a little more complicated. The more we know about reality—about its quantum mechanics and neural origins—the more palpable its paradoxes become. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, “The greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery.”
Consider, for example, the history of physics. Once upon a time, and more than once, physicists thought they had the universe solved. Some obscure details remained, but the basic structure of the cosmos was understood. Out of this naïveté, relativity theory emerged, fundamentally altering classical notions about the relationship of time and space. Then came Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the surreal revelations of quantum physics. String theorists, in their attempts to reconcile ever widening theoretical gaps, started talking about eleven dimensions. Dark matter still makes no sense. Modern physics knows so much more about the universe, but there is still so much it doesn’t understand. For the first time, some scientists are openly wondering if we, in fact, are incapable of figuring out the cosmos.
Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about “the bridging principle,” the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.
But scientists don’t talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain—we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry—these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don’t experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.
The fundamental point is that modern science has made little progress toward any unified understanding of everything. Our unknowns have not dramatically receded. In many instances, the opposite has happened, so that our most fundamental sciences are bracketed by utter mystery. It’s not that we don’t have all the answers. It’s that we don’t even know the question.
This is particularly true for our most fundamental sciences, like physics and neuroscience. Physicists study the fabric of reality, the invisible laws and particles that define the material world. Neuroscientists study our perceptions of this world; they dissect the brain in order to understand the human animal. Together, these two sciences seek to solve the most ancient and epic of unknowns: What is everything? And who are we?
But before we can unravel these mysteries, our sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings. The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress.
Since its inception in the early 20th century, neuroscience has succeeded in becoming intimate with the brain. Scientists have reduced our sensations to a set of discrete circuits. They have imaged our cortex as it thinks about itself, and calculated the shape of ion channels, which are machined to subatomic specifications.
And yet, despite this vast material knowledge, we remain strangely ignorant of what our matter creates. We know the synapse, but don’t know ourselves. In fact, the logic of reductionism implies that our self-consciousness is really an elaborate illusion, an epiphenomenon generated by some electrical shudder in the frontal cortex. There is no ghost in the machine; there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows or cares about you. In fact, you don’t even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
The problem with this method is that it denies the very mystery it needs to solve. Neuroscience excels at unraveling the mind from the bottom up. But our self-consciousness seems to require a top-down approach. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, “If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?” The paradox of neuroscience is that its astonishing progress has exposed the limitations of its paradigm, as reductionism has failed to solve our emergent mind. Much of our experiences remain outside its range.
This world of human experience is the world of the arts. The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym. They strive to capture life as it’s lived. As Virginia Woolf put it, the task of the novelist is to “examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day…[tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” She tried to describe the mind from the inside.
Neuroscience has yet to capture this first-person perspective. Its reductionist approach has no place for the “I” at the center of everything. It struggles with the question of qualia. Artists like Woolf, however, have been studying such emergent phenomena for centuries, and have amassed a large body of knowledge about such mysterious aspects of the mind. They have constructed elegant models of human consciousness that manage to express the texture of our experience, distilling the details of real life into prose and plot. That’s why their novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.
By taking these artistic explorations seriously, neuroscientists can better understand the holistic properties they are trying to parse. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together. In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set, providing science with a glimpse into its blind spots. If neuroscience is ever going to discover the neural correlates of consciousness, or find the source of the self, or locate the cells of subjectivity—if it’s ever going to get beyond a glossary of our cortical parts—then it has to develop an intimate understanding of these higher-order mental events. This is where the current methods of science reach their limit.
What neuroscience needs is a new method, one that’s able to construct complex representations of the mind that aren’t built from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole. William James, as usual, realized this first. The eight chapters that begin his epic 1890 textbook, The Principles of Psychology, describe the mind in the conventional third-person terms of the experimental psychologist. Everything changes, however, with chapter nine. James starts this section, “The Stream of Thought,” with a warning: “We now begin our study of the mind from within.”
With that single sentence, as radical in sentiment as the modernist novel, James tried to shift the subject of psychology. He disavowed any scientific method that tried to dissect the mind into a set of elemental units, be it sensations or synapses. Such a reductionist view is the opposite of science, James argued, since it ignores our actual reality.
Modern science didn’t follow James’ lead. In the years after his textbook was published, a “New Psychology” was born, and this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn’t be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.
But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium. No one demonstrates this better than James Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce attempted to capture the mind’s present tense. Everything in the novel is seen not from the omniscient perspective of the author, but through the concave lenses of his imaginary characters. We eavesdrop on their internal soliloquies, as Bloom, Stephen, and Molly think about beauty, and death, and eggs in bed, and the number eight. This, Joyce says, is the broth of thought, the mind before punctuation, the stream of consciousness rendered on the page. Ulysses begins where William James left off.
Similarly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, enchanted with opium, was writing poetry about the “the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking” long before there was even a science of the mind. Or look at the world of visual art. As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, “Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them.” Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.
Of course, the standard response of science is that such art is too incoherent and imprecise for the scientific process. Beauty isn’t truth; Monet got lucky. The novel is just a work of fiction, which is the opposite of experimental fact. If it can’t be plotted on a line graph or condensed into variables, then it’s not worth taking into account. But isn’t such incoherence an essential aspect of the human mind? Isn’t our inner experience full of gaps and non-sequiturs and inexplicable feelings? In this sense, the messiness of the novel and the abstraction of the painting is actually a mirror. As the poetry critic Randall Jarrell put it, “It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us—as logical and methodical generalizations cannot—our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions.”
No scientific model of the mind will be wholly complete unless it includes what can’t be reduced. Science rightfully adheres to a strict methodology, relying on experimental data and testability, but this method could benefit from an additional set of inputs. The cultural hypotheses of artists can inspire the questions that stimulate important new scientific answers. Until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective—and such a perspective might require the artistic imagination—our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves.
Neuroscience, of course, believes that it has no inherent limitations. One day, a team of scientists may explain human consciousness. The bridging principle will be solved. The mystery of experience will turn out to be another trick of matter. Such scientific optimism might be right. Only time will tell. (It’s worth noting that not every scientist is quite so optimistic. Noam Chomsky, for example, has declared that, “It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”) Regardless, it’s clear that solving the deepest mysteries of the brain—what the philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard questions of consciousness”—will require a new scientific approach, one that is able to incorporate the wisdom of the arts. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. Neither truth, when seen alone, is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.
At first glance, physics seems particularly remote from the subjective sphere of the arts. Its theories are extracted from arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses. Artists rely on the imagination, but modern physics exceeds the imagination. To paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.
But the surreal nature of physics is precisely why it needs the help of artists. The science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense. As Richard Feynman put it, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” It’s a brute fact of psychology that the human mind cannot comprehend the double-digit dimensions of string theory, or the possibility of parallel universes. Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. This is the irony of modern physics: It seeks reality in its most fundamental form, and yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending these fundaments beyond the math we use to represent them. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.
As a result, the history of physics is littered with metaphorical leaps. Einstein grasped relativity while thinking about moving trains. Arthur Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon. James Clerk Maxwell thought of magnetic fields as little whirlpools in space, which he called vortices. The Big Bang was just a cosmic firecracker. Schrödinger’s cat, trapped in a cosmic purgatory, helped illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It’s hard to imagine string theory without its garden hose.
These scientific similes might seem like quaint oversimplifications, but they actually perform a much more profound function. As the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman writes, “Metaphor in science serves not just as a pedagogical device, but also as an aid to scientific discovery. In doing science, even though words and equations are used with the intention of having precise meaning, it is almost impossible not to reason by physical analogy, not to form mental pictures, not to imagine balls bouncing and pendulums swinging.” The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms, so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations. The world of our ideas is framed by the only world we know.
But relying on metaphor can also be dangerous, since every metaphor is necessarily imperfect. (As Thomas Pynchon put it, “The act of metaphor is a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you are.”) The strings of the universe might be like a garden hose, but they are not a garden hose. The cosmos isn’t a plastic balloon. When we chain our theories to ordinary language, we are trespassing on the purity of the equation. To think in terms of analogies is to walk a tightrope of accuracy.
This is why modern physics needs the arts. Once we accept the importance of metaphor to the scientific process, we can start thinking about how we can make those metaphors better. Poets, of course, are masters of metaphor: The power of their art depends on the compression of meaning into meter; vague feelings are translated into visceral images. It’s not a coincidence that many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century—eminent figures like Einstein, Feynman, and Bohr—were known for their distinctly romantic method of thinking. These eminent scientists depended on their ability to use metaphor to see what no one else had ever seen, so that the railroad became a metaphor for relativity, and a drop of liquid helped symbolize the atomic nucleus. Poets can speed this scientific process along, helping physicists to invent new metaphors and improve their old ones. Perhaps we can do better than a garden hose. Maybe a simile will help unlock the secret of dark matter. As the string theorist Brian Greene recently wrote, the arts have the ability to “give a vigorous shake to our sense of what’s real,” jarring the scientific imagination into imagining new things.
But there’s another way that artists can bring something to the cosmic conversation: they can help make the scientific metaphors tangible. When the metaphysical equation is turned into a physical object, physicists can explore the meaning of the mathematics from a different perspective. Look, for example, at a Richard Serra sculpture. His labyrinths of bent metal let us participate in the theoretical, so that we might imagine the strange curves of space-time in an entirely new way. The fragmented shapes of cubism, which engaged in such a fruitful dialogue with the avant-garde physics of its time, served a similar purpose. Picasso never understood the equations—he picked up non-Euclidian geometry via the zeitgeist—but he was determined to represent this new way of thinking about space in his paintings. A century later, physicists are still using his shattered still lifes as a potent symbol of their science. Abstract art lets us comprehend, at least a little bit, the incomprehensible.
It’s time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method. (Our universities could begin by offering a “Poetry for Physicists” class.) But it’s also crucial to take our scientific metaphors beyond the realm of the metaphorical, so we can better understand the consequences of our theories. Art galleries should be filled with disorienting evocations of string theory and the EPR paradox. Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they’re meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.
Neuroscience can also benefit from the reactions of artists. Novelists can simulate the latest theory of consciousness in their fiction. If a theory can’t inspire characters that feel true, then it probably isn’t true itself. (Woolf, for example, was an early critic of Freudian theory, dismissing the way it turned all of her “characters into cases.”) Painters can explore new theories about the visual cortex. Dancers can help untangle the mysterious connection between the body and emotion. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science extends to art the invitation to participate in its conversation and the opportunity to add science to its repertoire. And by, in turn, interpreting scientific ideas and theories, the arts offers science a new lens through which to see itself.
C.P. Snow, the essayist who coined the “two culture” cliché, proposed a simple solution to the problem of divided cultures. He argued that we needed a “third culture,” which would close the “communications gap” between scientists and artists. Each side, Snow said, would benefit from an understanding of the other, as writers learned about the second law of thermodynamics and scientists read Shakespeare.
There is currently a nascent third culture, but it strays from Snow’s conception. While his third culture was based upon dialogue, our current third culture consists, almost entirely, of scientists talking directly to the general public. As John Brockman, the founder of this new third culture, wrote: “What traditionally has been called ‘science’ has today become ‘public culture’...Science is the only news.” There is, of course, much to be said for scientists cutting out “the middleman” and translating their data for the masses. Many of the scientists that make up this third culture have greatly increased the public’s understanding of the scientific avant-garde. From Richard Dawkins to Brian Greene, from Steven Pinker to E.O. Wilson, these figures not only do important scientific research, they write in elegant prose. In doing so, they are teaching us much.
But what of the collaboration between science and the arts? Are we really prepared to live with a permanent cultural schism? If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we’ll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement—perhaps a fourth culture—is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new works of art and so on. Instead of ignoring each other, or competing, or co-opting each other in naïve or superficial ways, science and the arts will truly impact each other. The old intellectual boundaries will disappear. Neuroscience will gain new tools with which to confront the mystery of consciousness and modern physics will improve its metaphors. Art will become a crucial source of scientific ideas.
This will ultimately lead us to take a broader view of truth. Right now, science is widely considered our sole source of Truth, with a capital “T.” Everything that can’t be stated in the language of acronyms and equations risks being disregarded as a pretty fiction, which is the opposite of scientific fact.
But the epic questions that modern science must answer cannot be solved by science alone. Bringing our two cultures together will allow us to judge our knowledge not by its origins, but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem teach us about ourselves? How does it help us understand who we are, or what the universe is made of? What long-standing problem has it engaged, perhaps even solved? If we are open-minded in our answers to these questions, we will discover that poems and paintings can help advance our experiments and theories. Art can make science better.
But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science’s inspiring descriptions of reality.
At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, “It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach.” The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other.
曾經與幾位在高科技領域有傑出貢獻的麻省大學者酒後八卦此排序。
今天見此論述，又想起當年的酒席來。與這篇文章，有神遇之感。