AND ANOTHER THING
A bubble chamber has nothing in common with a fashionable art gallery
PAUL JOHNSON
his week I had intended to write about the Daily Mirror, which is now challenging the News of the World for the title of Britain's most evil newspaper. But more pressing mat- ters have arisen, so the larrikins will have to wait A book has fallen into my hands which has set me thinking so furiously that I have found it hard to concentrate on other mat- ters. Professor Arthur Miller is professor of the history and philosophy of science at Uni- versity College, London, and his new book, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Copernicus, Springer-Ver- lag, New York, .£15.95) sets out to do two things: to solve the problem of the Two Cul- tures and bridge the gap between science and the arts; and, secondly, to do this by examining the visual notation systems where- by scientists assist their thinking and put down their hypotheses.
These are two important matters and Professor Miller brings to them a profundi- ty of knowledge (especially of physics) and a degree of originality which set the senses tingling and encouraged me to press ahead through pages of dense scientific explana- tion, jargon, maths and algebra in the hope of finding the Promised Land at the end. By Promised Land I mean the general the- ory of scientific and artistic genius, the equivalent to the unified system of laws which Einstein searched for (in vain) after he mastered relativity. I did not find it but in the process of searching I learned a great deal and came to some useful conclusions. I recommend this book strongly to anyone who is not afraid of hard intellectual work.
One of the main problems of science, as Miller explains, is how to express the inex- pressible: how to set down on paper thoughts which are beyond the limits of visual experi- ence. It is no accident, as Miller says, that relativity and atomic physics in the early 1920s were formulated by men trained to think and write in Germany. They thus had access to 'the rich philosophical lexicon of the German language' and they had usually studied Kant at school. When Kant needed a word that didn't exist, he invented it. It was one form of creativity. He distinguished between the mere processing of sensory per- ceptions, which almost anyone can do, and the higher cognition, which he called intu- ition, using a word, Anschauung, which can also mean 'visualisation'. This kind of skill is vital to scientific inquiry, especially when dealing with colossal entities, such as the uni- verse, and minute ones, as in atomic physics. Of course Kant was merely doing in a sophisticated form what homo sapiens has always done, conveying knowledge by words and recording it in symbols. I have just been in northern Spain where the Altamira Cave provides vivid evidence of how men or women, 20,000 years ago, recorded knowledge, using charcoal, red oxide and the natural contours of the cave ceiling, in a form which we call art but which to them was science (or both). Any- one who has read Heinrich Schafer's incomparable Principles of Egyptian Art will appreciate that when true Egyptian civilisa- tion was born, under the Third Dynasty, it all happened quite suddenly, this remark- able people acquiring their art, architec- ture, science, their hieroglyphic language and cultural style more or less simultane- ously, so interconnected were they all. Their visualisation was aspective, or pre- perspective, conveying, whether in sculp- ture or on papyrus, not what they could see but what they knew to be there. Their hieroglyphs, evolved from ideograms, served the same purpose, imparting knowl- edge according to canonical rules.
Scientists have always had to do this, using maths or algebra or whatever comes to hand. When John Dalton invented the philosophy of chemistry early in the 19th century he devised a system of ideograms to show how chemical elements combine to form compounds. Miller gives many other examples. Art is not essentially different. It is a system of ideograms which convey knowledge, though in such a way as to excite our emotions too, by appealing to our natural sense of beauty. It is Miller's contention that when a scientist visualises what he cannot see but intuits by putting his discoveries down on paper, whatever system of notation he uses, he exercises the same kind of talent, amounting at times to genius, which an artist employs in recording his knowledge of the world in paint and canvas or in stone. One of the most fasci- nating sections of his book shows how recent recording technology can validate a scientist's intuitive description of an invisible process by confirming his notational pat- terns. In huge particle accelerators, bunches of electrons collide with armies of protons. Recorded data of what then happens can be photographed in bubble chambers, a con- tained liquid through which a particle leaves a trail, like an aircraft's vapour-trail in the sky. A bubble chamber photograph of a neu- tron-proton smash shows a trail identical to a computer tracing of the same events pro- duced by merely using software containing such conservation laws as energy and momentum. This to me is a rational miracle, roving that the scientist can intuit the unseen and then confirm his intuition using a machine which itself sees things which to him are still hidden.
Where Professor Miller raises doubts is in drawing parallels between scientific notation and modern art, and the kind of skills which produce both. A bubble cham- ber photograph of the way in which a muon anti-neutrino scatters from an electron may look a bit like a painting by Paul Klee, but the resemblance is superficial. Cezanne's reverse perspective (or whatever it was) and Braque-Picasso Cubism may seem vaguely 'scientific' but do not tell us any- thing new about the real world. They were merely a fashionable artistic reaction to what, in the early 20th century, seemed the overwhelming power and novelty of sci- ence. Futurism was a better example of this process, but as it came from Italy instead of Paris it has lacked the PR muscle to keep it smart. To constitute art, a painting must convey knowledge as well as please us. If it merely pleases us (or some of us) it is not art but fashion. Picasso's 'Demoiselles d'Avignon', which Miller cites, does not actually tell us anything at all about women, any more than his later `Guernica' tells us anything about war or the incident it purports to describe. So both are not art but fashion and have the same type of aes- thetic value as an item of haute couture you buy in the Avenue Matignon. A great artist is close to a scientific genius when, like Velazquez in painting 'Las Meninae, he opens a pictorial window into a world of knowledge, about women, children, men, painters, dwarfs, royalty, light and a host of other things.
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