Under the Microscope/Dr William Reville: The utilitarian value of science is now widely acknowledged but recognition of its intrinsic cultural value is very slow in coming. Perhaps this has partly prompted the current vogue of bringing art and science together.
The Wellcome Trust now funds collaborative projects between scientists and artists. It is not entirely self-evident that such collaborations will prove to be professionally fruitful, but at the very least they will bring people from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum together.
The yawning gap, pointed to by CP Snow in 1959, between the two cultures of science and arts/humanities still persists. This gap will not be easily filled-in. Even in the university, where science and arts faculties sit together cheek by jowl, there is not much real collaboration between the two.
There are many sharp differences between science and the visual arts. Art is personal; science tries to be as impersonal as possible. Art evokes emotional responses; science tries to provide one true explanation of the natural world. Art is laden with value; results produced by basic science are value-free.
Art is individual, no Shakespeare means no Hamlet; details of the natural world unveiled by science are independent of the scientists who unveil them. Art can convey different meanings to different people; science tries to convey the same message to everyone.
Despite the many differences between science and art, both are creative activities and, it seems to me, if sensible collaborations are to be devised they must be based on this creative dimension.
Creativity in science is mostly about devising fruitful hypotheses to explain the natural world. This requires imagination and a special intuition that can sniff out the most felicitous hypotheses. Graceful hypotheses are much more likely to be correct than awkward ones. How scientific imagination and intuition can help the artist and how the creative skills of the artist can help the scientist is not clear to me.
Visual art is very important for enhancing our experience of the world. I saw the spire in O'Connell St for the first time last Saturday. My reaction was immediate, involuntary and verbal - "Wow." Quite soon my mental critic started up - "But it's only a long pointy thing" and "There's no great design in it." However, I quickly put the run on the critic. My first reaction was the true one. The spire is lovely and striking and inspiring, it makes you feel good.
Whatever about collaboration between scientists and the visual arts there is scope for the visual arts to depict the world as revealed by science just as it depicts other aspects of the world. For example, the microstructure of the biological world as revealed in the electron microscope is very beautiful and special, but it has inspired, to my knowledge, little or no art.
It is much easier to see scope for collaboration between science and other areas of the humanities than specifically between science and the visual arts. I am thinking of areas such as literature, poetry, history and music.
For example the theory of evolution is the central unifying theory in biology. Evolution has already happened and evolutionary research attempts to unravel the historical story. There must surely be scope for collaboration between scientists and historians to develop optimum ways to interrogate the physical past.
The craft of poetry can certainly aid the public understanding of science. Consider the poem by American poet John Updike on neutrinos. These are ghostly little particles that pour out of the sun, raining down upon the earth and passing through it and us, billions through every square inch of our bodies, as if we didn't exist.
Neutrinos, they are very small
They have no charge, they have no
mass
And do not interact at all
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply
pass
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass,
Ignore the most substantial wall
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall
And, scorning barriers of class
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads, into the grass.
At night they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed - you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.
William Reville is Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Director of Electron Microscopy at UCC