One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges, upon being asked to reveal the secret of his writing, responded that it is a matter of his “private metaphysics.” Alan Lightman’s public lecture titled The Novelist as Physicist is a remarkable account of a Borgesian “private” voyage through the world of Physics and fiction.
Physicist by vocation and novelist by choice, Lightman belongs to a rare breed of intellectuals who are nurtured on the elusive landscapes of science and art. Although Lightman does not confess that the taming of his romance between the two worlds is “private” or “metaphysical”, his portrayal of science and art as ever-contingent, integral, and as “two different approaches to Truth and being in the world” raises questions that are otherwise difficult to handle as “public metaphysics.”
Lightman’s lecture revolves around the similarities and differences between science and art, and the challenges that confront a practitioner of both these fields. Lightman discovered “the literary moment of his life” when, as a young boy, his rocket experiment went awry because he was more concerned with its shape than its aerodynamics. Lightman found himself at that moment having “sacrificed reality for aesthetics.” In this sense, Lightman sees the difference between reality and aesthetics as the fundamental contradiction between science and art.
Complicit with this view, Lightman argues that, unlike science, art and literature “bypass the brain” and connect directly to the human “emotion” or “heart” in a myriad of “participatory” ways. As a scientist-artist, Lightman believes that science can be “proven wrong” because an experiment could be disproved, whereas art and literature cannot be “proven wrong” because artistic representation does not seek a particular validity of its experimentation. The latter is a highly contentious, if not problematic claim and one that Lightman does not adequately elaborate. Is it not possible, for instance, “to disprove” or deconstruct literature or art that represents racism, sexism, hatred, and cultural prejudices in the foregone history of colonialism? Indeed, artists, literary critics and social scientists constantly engage in questions concerning the legitimacy within artistic representation.
Lightman further suggests that both science and art are driven by an iota of inevitability, if not necessity, to create new things. However he cautions that experiments alone cannot guarantee scientific discoveries because most scientific queries are resolved by the “free invention” and imaginative faculties of the mind. This entails that both science and art result from, and are driven by, a profound yearning for “aesthetic beauty”. In view of his earlier distinctions between science as “reality” and art as “aesthetics”, this is by far the most incontinent claim we come across in Lightman’s argument. He seems to suggest that a scientist can be an artist because he/she can consume and produce “aesthetics” on the one hand, while engaging with “reality” on the other, but not vice versa!
Of course, there can be no doubt that scientists may become aware of the aesthetic dimension of their activity; but the aesthetic dimension of art does not preclude artists from taking account of those scientific realities which pertain to “non-human” nature. It is often the case that artists dwell on realities rather consciously, if not deliberately, in an attempt to proliferate the aesthetics or existing realities. Moreover, artistic reflection and pure aesthetic indulgences have influenced scientific “realities” on more than one occasion since DaVinci.
In spite of some problematic claims and unanswered questions, Lightman’s lecture is a rare but delightful expression of his own “private metaphysics” – a confessional narrative of what it means to experiment with the world, while simultaneously representing it.
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Malreddy Pavan Kumar is a PhD Candidate in Sociology
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