The Science of Art and Beauty: How Ways of Seeing Inspires Ideas
BY WAN XIU WEN JEANNETTE
One idea struck a chord in me during this educational trip: to truly inspire, science must not just be “interdisciplinary” in our typical understanding of the term (i.e. a mixture of the sciences and engineering), but must touch the realm of the arts through its conception to its delivery. We must appreciate the importance of design in affecting the way we see, and ultimately manipulating how we think of things. From designing of experiments, to methods of displaying results – ways of seeing (framing) data and concepts are key to understanding it. Arguably then, a penchant for incorporating artistry in scientific work can lead to breakthroughs in science.
No place illustrates this idea better than in Qualcomm Institute (QI), a place where interdisciplinary teams in UC San Diego are brought together “to come up with innovative technology solutions to large-scale challenges facing society in the 21st century” [1]. The synergy of science and art displayed in QI can be described as such: both the visualization, and manipulation of how we visualize data and information using art and design.
We sat under a sprawling 5-million-megapixel wall and were introduced to the myriad of research programs QI is involved in. There was a mosaic of a 100 brains of schizophrenia sufferers; the cerebellum of a rat’s brain pieced together by segmented photography that made neurons visible to the naked eye; Da Vinci’s work stripped down to expose the initial charcoal sketches; 140 panorama photos taken by the Mars Spirit rover pieced together to reveal salt tracks unraveled by the rover’s faulty wheels. The message was clear: the importance of data visualization and using technology to visually explain a complex theory or system.
To augment their work, QI also collaborates with “Digital Artists”. They visualize and imagine dystopias and utopias, to make scientists uncomfortable, pushing them to think further. Lev Manovich, a professor in computer media is one such artist. In his work “Style Space: What we are learning about cultural variability and categories by studying 1,000,000 Manga pages”, he organized 1 million manga pages in terms of their visual properties (Figure 1) to produce a map of cultural evolution. Distinctly, there is a region in the top right of the map that remains unpopulated – almost like a creative ceiling in the manga universe. Such innovative visualization of data can provide glimpses and insights otherwise untapped.
Elaborating on ways of seeing, there remains an aspect of seeing that resides in the realm of the internal, outside of human design aesthetics: our personal biases. Bias steers how we unravel information and form ideas. In Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), we spent three days learning about the intricacies of gravitational wave science – a new window into the universe. We were brought on a journey through the mysteries and theories of the vast universe, learning about the Big Bang, neutron stars, binary compact mergers and more. I was impressed by how generations of physicists have looked up into the skies (or cooped themselves up in a room) and strung together grand theories of nature: its motion and creation. But this awe naturally led to some simple questions:
How did they come up with these ideas? What in their brains allowed them to stumble upon the thoughts of the gods? How could these theories be discovered through mere “armchair speculation”?
A possible clue that stuck in my mind was when Dr. Alan J. Weinstein at LIGO, mentioned this: “We like beautiful theories” – often we are biased in our pursuit of truth, by the pursuit of beauty. As Keat famously asked: is beauty truth? And is truth beauty? Beauty, in physics, often refers to elegant equations that, though appearing simple, can be used to underlie/explain countless phenomena. Perhaps, in our design, we have each been in-built with this as a key to unravelling the mysteries of this universe. And it seems that some (select few brilliant scientific minds) have been blessed with the tendency to doggedly pursue this proclaimed beauty, which can lead to speculations like Einstein’s Field Theory that has since been repeatedly supported by experimentalists to hold timeless.
However, this link between beauty and truth becomes muddled, and can often be unreliable. How to navigate this distinction, can be best described in this quote by Phillip Ball, a famous scientific writer:
“Anything that inspires scientific thinking is valuable, and if a quest for beauty – a notion of beauty peculiar to science, removed from art – does that, then bring it on. And if it gives them a language in which to converse with artists, rather than standing on soapboxes and trading magisterial insults like C P Snow and F R Leavis, all the better. I just wish they could be a bit more upfront about the fact that they are (as is their wont) torturing a poor, fuzzy, everyday word to make it fit their own requirements. I would be rather thrilled if the artist, rather than accepting this unified pursuit of beauty (as Ian McEwan did), were to say instead: ‘No, we’re not even on the same page. This beauty of yours means nothing to me.’ [3]
Finding beauty in the symmetry of the universe can lead to good theories. Yet, we must never forget the importance of the scientific method and the hard, often under-appreciated work of experimentalists in testing such speculations. The work at LIGO is the tireless work of hundreds of brilliant minds to test Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves, and cannot be discounted. According to Alan, the harsh truth is that “proving Einstein right can’t win you a Nobel Prize, but proving Einstein wrong can” – yet, one wonders whether without the hundreds upon thousands of experimentalists and theorists that have contributed to further corroborating and expanding (respectively) Einstein’s work, that he would have instead left a legacy as a raving lunatic, his ideas lost to skepticism.
Ultimately, this trip has showed me the importance of the tension between science and art: how its marriage can give birth to new ideas, but also how we must remained rooted in the scientific method when thus inspired.
[1] Qualcomm Institute (n.a.). Qualcomm Institute FAQs. Retrieved from http://qi.ucsd.edu/faqs.php.
[2] Manovich, L., Douglass, J., & Huber, W. (2011). Understanding scanlation: how to read one million fan-translated manga pages. Image & Narrative, 12(1), 206-228.
[3] Ball, Phillip (2014). Beauty ≠ truth. Aeon. Retrieved from https://aeon.co/essays/beauty-is-truth-there-s-a-false-equation .