the future of science… is art? (2)
Jonah Lehrer
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.
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