Art and Science

Leonardo, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 23b242, 1981 Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094x/81/03023W5 $02.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. Victor F. Weisskopf** I. SPACEIS BLUE What could be more different than science and art? The former is considered as a rational, objective, and cool study of nature; the latter is often regarded as a subjective, irrational outburst of feelings and emotions. One may also consider scientific discoveries as the products of imagination, of sparks of sudden insight, whereas art could be viewed as the product of painstaking work, carefully adding one part to the other by a rational thinking process. Surely art and science have something in common: both are ways to deal with our experiences and to lift our spiritsfrom daily drudgery to universal values. Let us start with the diversity of human experiences and the diversity of what we are doing with them. There are outer and inner experiences, rational and irrational ones, social experiences between two or many human beings, and experiences with the nonhuman part of nature. We think and ponder about them; we make use of them to improve our lives and to avoid material and emotional hardships; we are oppressed or elated by them; we feel sadness and joy, love and hate. We are urged to act, to communicate them to others; we try to relate them to the pattern of our lives. We want to influence people and our environment. All this is the raw material of human creativity. What are its manifestations? The creative spirit deals with our experiences and shapes them into various forms: the myths, the religions , the philosophies, the diverse arts and literatures, architecture, the sciences, medicine and technology, and social structures. These manifestations are directed toward many aims, practical and spiritual; their actual effects upon humankind are sometimes positive and constructive, sometimes negative and destructive, often without much relation to what the creators intended. Most forms of human creativity have one aspect in common: the attempt to give some sense to the various impressions, emotions, experiences, and actions that fill our lives, and thereby to give some meaning and value to our existence. The crisis of our time in the Western world is that search for meaning has become meaningless for so many of us. ~~ *Abridged version of the article that appeared in The American Scholar 48, 473 (1979). Copyright 01979 by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. Printed by permission of the publishers. **Physicist, Dept. of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. The different forms of human creativity often seem to be incommensurable, mutually exclusive, or even contradictory. I believe, however, that a better word is complementary, a term that has acquired a more focused significance since its use by Niels Bohr. My main purpose here will be to point out the complementarity, in Bohr’s sense, between the different avenues of human creativity-in particular between the arts and the sciences. Even within physics itself, we deal with concepts and discourses that on the surface are contradictory and mutually exclusive, but on a deeper level they are what Bohr aptly has called complementary. They represent different aspects of reality, one aspect excluding the other, yet each adding to our understanding of the phenomenon as a whole. The quantum state of an atom evanesces when it is observed by a sharp instrument designed to locate the electron. The state is restituted when the atom is left alone and given enough time to return to its original form. Both aspectsquantum state and location-are complementary to each other; they are necessary concepts to provide a full insight into atomic reality. Similar complementarities appear in all fields of human cognition, as Bohr often pointed out. They have to do with the question of relevance. In the atom, the wave picture (quantum state) is relevant for certain aspects of its reality, the particle picture for others. There are different ways of perceiving a situation, ways which may seem unconnected or even contradictory, but they are necessary for understanding the situation in its totality. A waterfall may be an object of scientific study, in which case the velocity distribution and the size...