More on ‘The Poetry and Music of Science’ – Contemplative Creativity and Being made in the Image of God

 

As I posted last time, one of my great joys is the opportunity to visit sixth-form classes to take a general studies sessions on the history and philosophy of science. I am often impressed by the students’ critical abilities and intelligence, but also wondered why at least some of the really bright ones choose not to study science at this level. Far too often I get answers along the lines of, “I didn’t see any role for my own creativity or imagination.”  At this point I know that something has gone terribly wrong in the message young people are receiving about science – that it is simply a body of ‘facts’ to learn, a set of known questions with right ‘answers’. Yet working scientists know that without imagination there can be no progress in science at all, and that  formulating the right questions, not answers, is the central and critical step in our inspirational calling to ‘re-imagine the universe’.

What seems to have happened is that what I would now call the ‘second half of the scientific method’ – that is the way that we test our ideas when we have had them, has dominated all discussion of the way science is done, so that the first, and more important half has been effectively silenced. There may be no formal ‘method’ for having the ideas or formulating the hypothesis in the first place, but that does not diminish the essential importance of ideation.

I determined to explore where the threads that bind science to the creative imagination had become unraveled. This led to a long journey into its history, philosophy and theology, but I decided to begin simply by asking colleagues to tell me the story behind their most cherished idea or discovery. I didn’t want the polished results and the covered tracks, but the unvarnished truth of how science is actually done, from biophysics to materials science to astronomy. They gave fascinating accounts of curiosity, initial trials, chance encounters repeated frustrations and, in fortunate cases, illuminations that often seemed to come effortlessly, as ‘gifts’, and during moments of rest or mental relaxation.

I felt enabled to reflect more deeply on my own experiences of seeking, and sometimes finding, scientific ideas in the imagination—the macromolecular picture that began as a dance in my mind’s eye; the long-sought structural geometry of a two-phase fluid that came in a dream; the sudden and simultaneous realisation of what a polymer network was doing as a colleague and I glanced at each other and shared the same thought… I also asked the same questions, as a sort of ‘control’ of artists, composers, poets and writers.  Would their stories of creativity differ markedly from those of the scientists? The first remarkable (for me) discovery from those conversations was that, just as the scientists tended to be shy about the inspiration phase of their work, so the artists were a little coy at first about just how much experiment, re-working, encounter with material constraints, they themselves experienced in their own work. I have often hears scientists say of, say, novelists, ‘it’s all very easy for you – you can make your characters do just as you please; we have to get things right!”. Nothing could be further from the truth. It turns out that thinking of creativity as the outward and explosive force of the imagination being met and formed into something true and beautiful by the world’s constraints, is just as true a generalization of science as of art.

The new book, The Poetry and Music of Science, began to take shape – here I write a little more about the story of its writing. I thought at first that it would begin with an account of scientific creation, followed by material from conversations with the artists, composers and writers, motivating a final discussion of the similarities and differences. Yet this structure proved impossible to impose. Dividing scientific and artistic creativity along the ‘Two Cultures’ lines in this way just wasn’t faithful to the experiences I was hearing about, nor to the rare but occasional accounts of creativity in science and the arts, such as the physiologist William Beveridge’s 1950 book The Art of Scientific Investigation, which deliberately echoes novelist Henry James’ earlier The Art of the Novel. Instead, science and art seem to share three imaginative modes, which I have called the visual, the textual and the abstract.

The first is the realm of visual art, and of visual conception in science from cosmology to biophysics. Visual thinking is so powerful that it endows us with our normal metaphor for understanding itself – ‘I see!’ Plato thought that vision itself was an ‘extromissive’ process – that visual rays from our eyes alight upon objects and allow us to perceive them. I have come to hesitate before criticizing such old and ‘unscientific’ ideas hastily: modern neuroscience teaches us just how much we create what we think we see. That is after all what ‘Bayesian inference’ means. Seeing is indeed a creative process, and arguably science itself can be defined as an extension of our visual perception. Theoretical science creates internal vision in our ‘mind’s eye’ into the smallest biological cells or out into the processes at the heart of distant galaxies; experiment enhances our vision directly with microscopes and telescopes. There are close parallels between scientific imagination and expressionist art, where the viewer’s plane of focus is perpetually redirected between the two ‘planes’ of the canvas and the world behind it. And much mathematical conception is essential visual.

The second mode of imagination employs words and text, rather than image. The story here begins with the coincident but not coincidental origin of the experimental method and the literary novel. We find Daniel Defoe writing the ‘experiment’ of Robinson Crusoein the same mode as Robert Boyle’s new style of scientific writing, and even claiming that the novel was an authentic record of diarized events. Margaret Cavendish, the great natural philosopher of the late 17^thcentury, chooses a novelistic ‘science fiction’ setting – in her Blazing World–to mount her most serious critique of the new ‘experimental philosophy’.  The mutual entanglement of imaginative writing and science continues from Newton and Milton, via Goethe and Humboldt, to Coleridge and Davy. Then in Wordsworth we find an almost prophetic glimpse into two possible futures, one in which science grows to inspire the great poetry of the future, and another in which its structures, powers and beauties fail to achieve a universal cognizance, and so retreats into an exclusive world of the technical and abstruse. Sadly the latter future seems to be the one we have inherited, for now at least.

The first page of the printed score of Hayden’s Creation (Novello edn.) – a musical depiction of chaos.

The third imaginative domain is the miracle of the wordless, picture-less worlds of music and mathematics.  At the point at which there are no images and no words left to us, and when we expect a conceptual vacuum, there we find these transcendent wonders. An assumed connection between music and mathematics has become a commonplace, but I do not think we really understand it. The occurrence of numbers in both is really a misleading commonality – the numerical is not the core essence of mathematical structures; nor is it at the centre of musical creativity. The family relationship becomes clearer at the deeper level of harmonic patterns and sequences of music, and at the partially resolved architectures of mathematical reasoning. To discover this requires not only a broad panoramic gaze over the fields, but also deep-dives into the creation of particular examples. Sitting at the feet of scholars in literature, music and mathematics has been one of the most satisfying experiences of the project – one pay-off for example was the privilege of working with Durham musicologist Julian Horton over an analysis of my favourite piece of music, Robert Schumann’s Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra. Not only does this musical glory deserve a published structural analysis, but the epoch of its writing coincides with the fragmentation of disciplines in the 19^thcentury that runs parallel with a silencing of conversation on imagination in science.

Detailed examination of the three imaginative modes also uncovered a truth that may be uncomfortable to some: thought and emotion are inseparable in all stories of creativity. In our late modern world we pretend that cognition and rationality can be divorced from the affective currents in our minds. It turns out that David Hume was attuned to this deception – maybe this is one reason that Einstein, so aware of the vital imaginative energies of science, read him with such avidity. But the last era that saw a wide, communicated and nuanced contemplation of creative impulses turns out to be the medieval. Anslem, Grosseteste and Aquinas knew, surely through longer, deeper and more unhurried internal gaze than we habitually permit ourselves, that emotions are not just pinned to the start (desire) and end (joy) of the creative process, but weave their way throughout the stages of conception, trial, retreat, incubation, inspiration, and refinement.

That very structure to the creative process leads to the slow dawning of another realization – that in the human miracle that brings structure and beauty into existence where there was nothing before – there is a great narrative. Christopher Booker is one of those writers who have attempted a categorization of the ‘great plots’ of all human stories. He lists the love story, the great battle of good and evil, the journey home among other ur-stories of literature and experience. But the human story of creation seems to be another, although missed out from such lists. It is the ultimate romantic adventure – all creativity begins with a desire reach a dimly-perceived goal, whether that be a sonnet on a visage or the science of vision. There is surprise on the meeting of unexpected constraints, whether of oil-paint on canvas or of observational data. The frustration and despair at inability to progress is shared by those experiencing writers’ block as much as wrong predictions of an experiment. The resignation of time spent fallow, the moving on to other matters when all seems hopeless, is shared by composers and chemists, but so is the occasional joy when the wonderful and under-researched subconscious creative processes of the human mind throw up solution strategies at the most unexpected moments. I did not expect to have to read my way into the literature of narrative analysis, or of left and right brain lateralization, but it turns out that an account of creativity is impossible without them.

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

When all the angels sang for joy … Job Ch. 38

The final surprise for me was the suggestion of a new task – to account for the deeply-felt human purpose in bringing the new into being. There is a teleology in creativity. Here the discipline of theology is unique in brining its critical tools to bear on illuminating the deepest seam of all. The drive to bring order out of chaos, to seek for beauty and understanding where dullness and ignorance lay before, draws on deep roots within our religious traditions. The study of creativity is another way in to seeing that to ask ‘how one reconciles’ science and religion, is profoundly the wrong question. Until the last century or so, the moral and purposive framing of natural discovery has been assisted by the traditions of contemplation and theology. I was led once more to sources such as the incomparable Book of Job, found buried in the central pages of the Old Testament, that contains such jewels as the ‘Hymn to Wisdom’ in which human insight into the deep material structures of the world is compared to the unique vision of the miner into the underground structures of the Earth. The ‘visual mode’ of scientific imagination turns out to possess very old roots. Job links knowledge of the world to the heart of wisdom itself, and the ability of humans to see deeply into the structures of the world as an aspect of sharing in the divine. There is insight here into the Biblical mystery of the Imago Dei – the idea that human beings are in some sense ‘in the image of God’. How this extraordinary idea is to be interpreted has spawned theological debate down the centuries, but one way to think about it that brings the huge potential, yet great responsibility of homo sapiens into focus, is through creativity itself. We, too, create, and so alter and grow the world around us.

Thinking about creativity in this way leads to serious consequences for how we teach science at school or share it in public, and for how we train our researchers, even in entirely secular contexts. I  cannot recall a single discussion during my own formation as a scientist of what practices, disciplines, rhythms of work and relaxation, types of reading or directions of thought might encourage that vital visit from the scientific muse. When challenged about this, many colleagues expressed doubt that anything can be said. As traditionally formulated, the scientific method describes only the second phase of the process—testing ideas. There is no method, it is claimed, for having ideas. But this does not imply that there is an absence of any possible advice. We know that innovation rarely emerges from exposure to narrowly conventional thinking. This is why interdisciplinary conversation is so important. Time spent talking across boundaries causes ideas to spark over the highly-charged disciplinary gaps, shocking us into new modes of thinking. Furthermore, those ‘aha’ moments—which more than one scientist has told me are what they live for—never come when the conscious mind is busy. They are the product of the unconscious winnowing of apparently fruitless weeks of labour into fresh thought. They will never come unless we give them the space to do so. Hence the need to alternate hard work with experiencing liminal moments of changing mental space.

It is my great hope that we can move the public history of scientific ideas back onto the track that Wordsworth, Goethe and Humboldt enacted in their own inspirational prose and poetry. To do this we will need to talk more openly about the creative process in science, its groping in darkness as much as its illumination, its contemplative practice as much as its generation of understanding, its way to wisdom as much as its path to knowledge.

 

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The Poetry and Music of Science

In this month’s blog, I write about the story of a new book, out in March 2019 with OUP, The Poetry and Music of Science. It follows from one of the consequences of a ‘theology of science’ articulated in Faith and Wisdom in Science – that of the ‘healing of the academy’. If the first is my ‘not a science and religion book’, then this is my ‘not the two-cultures book’. Here is how it happened, once upon a time ….

 

‘I just didn’t see in science any room for my own imagination or creativity.’

Not just on one occasion, but repeatedly have I heard this from young students bright enough to have succeeded at any subject they set their minds to. Yet it doesn’t take an Einstein to observe that without the essential first step, without a creative re-imagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all. Einstein did of course have something to say on the matter, in his book with Leopold Infeld:

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Every scientist knows this, but for two centuries we have fallen largely silent about it, preferring instead a narrative about the ‘empirical method’ or, ‘the logic of scientific discovery.’ Science education is full of it, favouring the presentation of results, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science. Our media mouths the same message – ‘there is no room for imagination in science’ assured the presenter of a TV documentary on computer science, face to camera. No wonder my young colleagues became disillusioned.

If scientists are somewhat shy about their experiences of imagination, then I found that the artists, writers and composers I spoke to needed the same patience (and similarly the occasional drink) to draw them out on their repeated need to experiment. Scraping the paint from the canvas, re-drafting the novel for the tenth time, rescoring the thematic musical material is, as every artist knows, the consequence of the material constraints that creativity meets unanticipated. The artist, too, makes hypotheses about how her material, words or sounds will achieve the goal in mind, however indistinctly conceived. The historically simultaneous birth of the English novel and the experimental method in science turns out to be no coincidence. Without making the naïve claim that art and science are in any sense ‘doing the same thing’, the similarities in the experience of those who work with them are remarkable. They need digging out because they become obscured by scientists shy of talking about imagination and artists about experiment.

The project of listening to anyone who creates, be it with music or mathematics, oil paint or quantum theory, and the creative power of the constraints they encounter, became itself the project of a book. Yet in a strange obedience to the pattern of its material, the originally-imagined plot of The Poetry and Music of Science refused to play out. Juxtaposed catalogues of creation in science and art, followed by an extended ‘contrast and compare’ essay, increasingly failed to do justice to the material. Historical and contemporary sources were telling a very different story about creative imagination, one that did not divide across the worn-out lines of ‘The Two Cultures’. Instead, a pattern of three ‘modes’ of creative expression seemed more faithful.

Visual imagination is, of course, the chief source for the artist, but the same is true for many scientists, from molecular biology to astrophysics. Astronomy is the provider of the original projective perspective. If the observer of a painting is asked to re-create a three-dimensional world from a representation or impression on a two-dimensional canvas, then the task of ‘seeing’ the universe from the picture that we call the sky, bears clear structural resemblance.

A second mode is textual and linguistic. The entanglement between science and the written word in prose or poetry may possess a principle knot at the birth of the novel, as we have already noted, but its story is a much longer one. It also has an ‘alternative history’, envisioned by Wordsworth (and surely Goethe and Humboldt before him) in which

The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us.

With notable exceptions (such as R S Thomas and occasionally W B Yeats in poetry, and the ever-present fluttering trespass of Vladimir Nabukov’s beloved butterflies from his scientific work into his novels) this early-Romantic vision has sadly yet to be fulfilled, and is surely frustrated by the very desiccated presentation of science with which we began.

Imagination’s third mode appears as both pictures and words fade away. For there, when we might have expected a creative vacuum, we find instead the wonderful and mysterious abstractions of music and of mathematics. This shared space is surely why these two have something in common – it is surely not their superficial sharing in numerical structure that links melody and harmony with mathematical structure, but their representational forms in entire universes of our mental making.

The 40000 year old ‘Lion Man’ ivory (Museum of Ulm)

When a journey has taken one to as numinous a place as this, it is but a short step to recognise the need for theological thinking to make sense of it all. The anthropology and cognitive neuroscience of creativity is fascinating, the one taking as to the stone tools of our distant ancestors at the dawn of humanity, the other to the delicate balance between the analytic left hemisphere of our brains and the integrative right. The philosophical tradition is equally rich, discovering, for example Levinas’ suspicion of the ‘visual’ mode for its implied distancing, preferring the ‘musical or auditory’ for its immersion of subject in object. But theology seems to be unique in maintaining possession of the critical tools necessary to tease out the role of purpose in human creativity. Both the artistic and scientific modes of re-imagining nature seem to have been part of what drives humans to be human for as long as the records of those attempts have survived. It is the rich tradition of understanding humans themselves as some form of living ‘image’ – the Imago Dei – that does justice to the experience of deploying creativity to a purpose. George Steiner wrote in his Real Presences:

Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter
I could say precisely the same of science.

But Where can Wisdom be Found?

This is a different sort of post.  There is a fair bit to report in due course on the central theme of Faith and Wisdom in Science –  the great cultural story of science within our communities, its deep (and theological) roots, and how it needs healing.  I will write in days to come on the Times Cheltenham Science Festival Debate, ‘Can Science and Faith Coexist?’, and on an evening at the Cambridge Wesley Methodist Church ‘Science and Faith’ series – but not today.  For today other ligaments within the body of our society need healing. 

Once again, and desperately, we need not fighting spirit,  not left or right wing concepts, not racy rhetoric or the sure soundbite, but Wisdom.  At the end of the darkest week I can remember in this country, the appalling, senseless, tragic murder of Yorkshire MP Jo Cox has opened our eyes to a shadow of evil that has been stealthily blocking out the light.  Since the first days of the campaigning in the lead-up to this Thursday’s EU referendum in the UK, our public debate has become increasingly sour, twisted with untruth, debased to thoughtless side-taking – and worse of all – infested with what Albert Camus called La Peste, the repeatedly resurfacing evil within us that dehumanises humans for political gain.  The people that Jo Cox spent her life as an MP to help, and before that with the charity Oxfam, the men, women and children in positions of fear, homelessness and despair, through no fault of their own, that she sprang to aid – these people, all equally as we are beloved of God, have had painted on them the objectifying ‘Immigrant’.  I wrote a book decrying the dehumanisation of science – but much much more needs to be done in the face of the dehumanisation of people themselves.  When our media and our political leaders do this we need to speak out and condemn it.

It’s strange how the themes of the predicament that I think science has been driven into are amplified and deployed more widely in this case.  The use of language to dehumanise is one.  It has happened with science.  The replacement of depth with shallowness, of contemplation with instant gratification, of complexity with superficiality – this is another.  One of the leaders of the campaign to leave the EU, Michael Gove, in on record (quite astonishingly and irresponsibly for a Cabinet Minister) speaking out against ‘experts’ and their voice in the debate.  But what is an ‘expert’ if not someone who has spent years of study in acquiring knowledge, experience, information and competency in a field.  Science rejoices in expertise – not in isolation – for it needs a critical public to ask it questions, to challenge, to weigh up, even to enjoy.  So should any political process, and to abjure it is to abandon the role of a responsible leader in any field.  This question, of the subtle balance of a nation’s sovereignty, trade, and position of global responsibility, needs expertise of the highest order to decide.

The commentator on US politics for the BBC for over 40 years, Alastair Cooke, in one of his broadcasts cited an elderly US Senator pleading that what that nation needed now was neither more hawks, nor more doves, but was suffering from a lamentable shortage of owls.  We too, at this time, so need the precious commodity of Wisdom.  But where can wisdom be found? Where does understanding dwell? is the great cry in the Hymn to Wisdom of the Old Testament Book of Job (chapter 28).  The writer wanders to the depths of the earth, to the ocean bottom, to the marketplace of gold, precious gemstones and fine goods – and finds no sign of it.

At the very end of the Hymn we read something astonishing – that the way to wisdom, as God knows is, is to view ‘everything under the heavens’, ‘appraising’, ‘confirming’ and ‘testing’.  And to follow this ability – this expert and God-given ability to see into the workings of the world in response to Him (that is what is meant by the ‘fear of the Lord’ here) – that is wisdom, and finally:

and to shun evil is understanding

That is the word for this week.  May this terrible death not pass utterly in vain, may her words and life remind us what wisdom is, and to choose our future accordingly.

 

Can Science be more like Music? An Experiment with Light and Song

Karl Popper once wrote: “A great work of music, like a great scientific theory, is a cosmos imposed upon chaos – in its tensions and harmonies in exhaustible even for its creator”. If this is true (and it needs some unpacking before we can get to work on that question) then might great music be a source of illumination of great physics? Might physics inform and deepen our enjoyment of music? I don’t know – but I mean to find out with the help of scientific and musical colleagues in Durham this November, when we set out on a musical and experimental exploration for the International Year of Light.

Of course, musical themes and analogies surface frequently in Faith and Wisdom in Science.  I even imagine a nightmare world, in the introduction, where we have ‘locked away’ music from general human enjoyment and celebration in the same way that we seem to have done with science. Music, of course, has its ‘ladder’ of expertise – with international concert soloists at the top, and most of us somewhere towards the bottom – but nevertheless happily enjoying, and critically engaging with, the production of music in its new writing and performance.  The problem with science is that someone seems to have removed most of the lower rungs of its ladder!  Can we get them back by enjoying science and music together?

Perhaps it was hearing about the idea of the International Year of Light that alerted me to the amount of music, especially choral music, which seems to be inspired by the idea of light. Of course one reason for this is that light itself becomes a metaphor for so much beyond: understanding, hope, creation itself, which in turn inform and inspire music.

The first page of the printed score of Hayden’s Creation (Novello edn.) – a musical depiction of chaos.

Perhaps the ‘classic’ (in every sense of the word) musical moment that captures light-inspiration is the chorus in Hayden’s ‘Creation’ where order bursts out over the composer’s brilliant musical depiction of chaos: “… and … there … was… LIGHT!” – the chorus tip-toes over the introductory words from the Book of Genesis then explode in a cascade of fortissimo harmonies. Shut your eyes and you hear space filled with coruscating colour and brilliance.

But I think that Popper meant more than this by his musings on music. He is talking about form – that essential constraint on imagination that turns inspiration into art. Here he is surely onto something, for in science too we achieve understanding both through powerful imagination (‘could like be like a wave in some sense?’) and severe constraint (‘what happens if I direct a beam though this tiny hole …?). Could it be in this sense that both art and science fashion the order of form and pattern from the chaos of unfettered wild imagination and ignorance – and is it this that makes both music and science so basically human?

We are inviting all comers to an afternoon of hands-on experimental exploration of light from 2pm at Trevelyan College, Durham on Saturday November 14^th. Three themes frame the activities – light as a combination of wavelengths and colour, light

Trevelyan College, Durham University

as a carrier of information and light and a conveyer of energy for life. It will come as no surprise that we plan to explore the glaring analogy of colour and musical pitch during the afternoon – but we want to go further. Then for one hour from 4pm the Durham Singers will pick up on these same themes in a programme of music from 400 years of history. Two centrepieces to look forward to will be the Bach chorale Jesus, mein Lebens Licht, from the 17^th century and a world Premiere of Light by local composer Janet Graham. Graham’s new piece sets words by another North-East artist – poet Gordon Hodgeon, now totally incapacitated by spinal injury, yet still writing. Light carries ‘words’ of information of chemistry and dynamics to us from distant stars. In this piece, Light literally becomes for us the only carrier of the poet’s words, distanced by the light-years of extreme disability. It looks like being a thoughtful and a moving occasion, and also an inspiring one. Come and join us!