Bridging two great traditions

(Last of two parts)

When did we start to think that understanding or truth is the hermit that resides exclusively in either the mathematical computations of the scientist or the inspired strokes of the artist? The human brain is configured in such a way that we have at least a two-way split in viewing things, so why be a captive resident of only one way of thinking? It is like being doomed to seeing eroticism only in total nudity. Why would you want to impoverish your mind this way? We are not called to be geniuses in either but to be open in appreciating what each great human tradition could reveal to us about what makes us human and perhaps, how we could be better humans.

But be careful that you bridge the two great traditions of the sciences and the humanities. The key is to bridge, NOT to fuse. When doing scientific research, it is very important that one carefully defines the question so that you do not open yourself to the delusion that you have found the answer to everything, including the meaning of life. Science has a prescribed way of knowing through experiments and verification by peers so that what they discover and find out applies to everyone, given the defined conditions, regardless of whether they are king or peasant. What they stumble upon are universal representations of the physical world. Newton "discovered" gravity but those who did not are not blissfully exempted from it. But being mired only in physical laws and computations of science robs the experience of discovery of the sense of awe about the larger mysteries that lurks beyond the present discovery. When I meet a scientist who can play a musical instrument, actively listen to good music, recite or write poetry, not even in a level that he/she could do his or her science, I feel so privileged to have chanced upon someone who knows how to become fully alive.

Works of art are unique representations of reality – each a signature of the artist’s encounter, by chance or deliberate, with his life and the world around him. I have had encounters with art that are so abstract that by no stretch of my already very wild imagination could I find even the faintest hint of an awareness of the world. Ignorant as I probably am to the who’s who in the art world, such kind of art makes me feel like a bound hostage of someone’s caged psyche, with its own private laws, rather than a guest invited to see what she might into the work. I might as well have been looking at a brain scan of a coma patient.

These two ways of knowing in the sciences and in the humanities are separate but not isolated. The two traditions are profound reminders that we are beings who yearn for precision as well as imagination, for certainty as well as mystery. It is easy to say that you want to go only for certainty but no one who has ever lived or is living now was born without life’s sure promise of surprises. So believe as you might in the absolute certainty of whatever you believe in, but nature has, time and again, had her way, surprising even the most calculating of species. That is what makes this chain of lifetimes worth the energy it spends on itself.

The sciences and the humanities are dating again. And just like lovers, they can only remain so if they are separate beings, complete unto themselves but able to lock eyes or touch where it matters to make for a fuller understanding of our common humanity. In fact, artists and scientists have signed on to seal their relationship in one engagement and called it Signatures of the Invisible.

The published story in the journal Nature in 2005 had it that an artist and a scientist met each other nine years ago in a spot in the French Alps and wondered about a way through which artists and scientists could seriously engage each other. The artist was Ken McMullen, a filmmaker and a research professor at London’s University of the Arts, while the other was a renowned physicist named Maurice Jacob, the head of the Theory Division at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva which now houses the biggest scientific instrument on Earth known as the Large Hadron Collider. It was not easy to convince funders and others in positions that mattered, to let the artists and scientists engage each other in a project like this. But the engagement eventually happened and 12 artists were given access to the CERN where the artists and the scientists, on equal footing, entered into rich exchanges on their different ways of looking at things. What resulted were not simply illustrations of science but rather, the married expressions of two great equal traditions in art and in science in seeing the world. I noted that the project did not want the artists to illustrate the science that is explained to them; rather they were supposed to "respond" to the science they had been exposed to, by working on the interplay between their chosen medium and science concept. These "responses" are what they called the Signatures of the Invisible.

I passionately wish for more signatures of this kind – the kind that scientists and artists risk losing themselves in, whether in the form of rethinking an old belief about themselves or about the world, so that we can elevate our experience of our humanity to a quality where we somehow feel we deserve the birthright that we share with every star there is, in whatever season of the story of the universe we find ourselves in. Hold the powers and limitations of the two great traditions in creative tension and watch yourself grow toward becoming human.

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