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Reviewed by:
  • La science n'est pas l'art
  • Jacques Mandelbrojt
La science n'est pas l'art by Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond. Editions Hermann, Paris, France, 2010. 119 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-27056-6945-4.

In this provocative book, whose title page humorously reads both "Science and Art" and "Science Isn't Art," physicist and essayist Lévy-Leblond examines, in a critical and subtle manner, similarities, often expressed by scientists, between art and science. The chapters are like essays, each exploring different points of view on these similarities. He concludes with his own brief encounters with art as a scientist.

Lévy-Leblond starts by examining the nature of beauty in science and asks if beauty implies art. Many of the greatest scientists insist on the existence of the criterion of beauty in science, and some, such as Hermann Weyl or Dirac, go as far as to assert that aiming at beauty is more important than aiming at truth for advancing science. But how many splendid theories have been overthrown by miserable experiments, as biologist and philosopher Thomas Huxley pointed out? Lévy-Leblond notes that while scientists talk of beauty in science, modern or contemporary art does not refer to beauty. Actually, most scientists who speak of beauty in science refer to traditional pre-Romantic art, or even Platonic beauty.

What is a beautiful theory, what is a beautiful experiment, a beautiful proof of a theorem? The beauty of a scientific statement or proof is linked to its simplicity, to its generality. Perhaps the true beauty of science lies, as it does in most human activities, in the adequation between the instruments and their function. A beautiful formula, a beautiful experiment, is one that is adapted to its purpose with maximum simplicity and efficiency. In science, only a long work can remodel the original ideas to get rid of all its useless aspects and lead to (temporarily) final expressions. Lévy-Leblond gives the example of Kepler's laws of planetary motion: It took more than a century for it to be discovered that they were the consequences of Newton's laws of gravitation.

What if the feeling of beauty is the illumination scientists have at the moment when they suddenly understand a new aspect of nature? Two concepts, according to Lévy-Leblond, should replace that of beauty: adequation and power. Adequation relates the ideas to the phenomena being studied, and the power of these ideas reflects the fact that they can apply to numerous different phenomena.

Lévy-Leblond examines several aspects of images in science. Since 1970, modern technology has led science to discover fascinating images of the microcosms or the macrocosms, or of biology. The question is: Should these images be considered art? The beauty of scientific images is compelling for the non-scientist and accounts for the increasing esotericism of scientific concepts or theories. Lévy-Leblond finds that publishing or exhibiting these images aims mainly at making science more popular. He notes furthermore that research scientists do not actually work with these images but with the series of numbers or curves that generate the images, which would not have the same public appeal.

In the past century, art and science have had similar evolutions; they moved first toward abstract concepts and then toward the use of new technologies. Lévy-Leblond rejects the idea of the influence of science on art that their parallel histories seem to imply, just as he is reluctant to accept analyses of art made by psychologists of perception.

After having rejected the usually accepted view of encounters between art and science, Lévy-Leblond gives examples of what he calls "brief encounters" between art and science. He gives examples of artworks, in particular those of Morellet, Charvolen, Kowalski, Beuys, Anselmo and Rabinowitch, which take on a special meaning when seen from his point of view as a scientist.

Several examples can be found in the domain of art and mathematics. Here again Lévy-Leblond starts by being very critical, rightly so, of the interpretations of art historians who artificially find the Golden Ratio contained in works by artists who did not actually use its...

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