The art of science | Thomas W. Hodgkinson

A few years ago, the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, where I work, published a list of the 23 most important mathematical challenges of our time. Soon afterwards, we received an email from Stephen Wolfram — the prolific English physicist, tech founder and AI expert, who is a household name among scientists — in which he declared that most lists of this kind are useless, but ours was pretty good. He added wryly that he had already personally worked on “an absurdly large number” of these cutting-edge problems: 19 out of 23 of them, in fact.

So when the mercurial Dr Wolfram came to the London Institute the other day to talk about his ideas, I was keen to hear what he had to say. He monopolised his listeners’ attention. With soft-spoken certainty, he expounded his belief in re-examining the foundation of established fields: it is here, he said, that some of the biggest advances are to be made. He explained how he uses tools developed by his tech firm to make discoveries at an ever faster rate. Yet perhaps the claim that most resonated with me was when Dr Wolfram described maths as “an artistic endeavour”.

This appealed for two reasons. The first is that, as a science writer with an arts degree, I’m intrigued by the idea that scientists and artists, far from being opposites, have more in common than is generally supposed. This feels like a fitting theme on the day of the Nobel ceremony, which honours not only scientists, but also writers. Think about this for a moment. Alfred Nobel created the world’s most distinguished awards for people who have conferred “the greatest benefit on mankind”. Clearly these should include the best minds in medicine, chemistry and physics. But why poets, playwrights and novelists?

The second reason I like to think about the ways in which art and science interact is that my colleagues and I work in a building that, for more than two centuries, has promoted that very interaction. I mean the Royal Institution in Mayfair, a place that hosts the world’s oldest series of science talks. Yet its Friday Evening Discourses, which this year celebrate their 200th birthday, have been about more than science. As well as providing a stage for scientists from Michael Faraday to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Geoffrey Hinton, these lectures have been delivered by the painter John Constable, the actor Henry Irving, the critic Kenneth Clark, the novelist E.M. Forster and the poet John Betjeman. “Out of the 3,300 or so Discourses since Michael Faraday first founded them in 1825, I would say that about 500 were non-scientific,” says the Royal Institution’s resident science historian Katy Duncan.

Since the Royal Institution was founded in 1799, this arts-science crossover has been in its blood. One of its first resident scientists, Sir Humphry Davy, inhaled laughing gas with Samuel Coleridge and wrote reams of poetry himself. Davy’s successor, Michael Faraday, so impressed Charles Dickens that the novelist asked him if he could peruse his lecture notes. Dickens’ most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, may even have been named in coded tribute to the Royal Institution, with “David” referring to Davy, and “Copperfield” to Faraday’s breakthroughs in electromagnetism. The next resident professor, John Tyndall, was friends with the Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, and gazed at the night sky through Tennyson’s telescope.

So it went on into the 20th century. While running the Royal Institution, Sir William Bragg, a Nobel Laureate in physics, hosted Rudyard Kipling, a Nobel Laureate in literature. His son, Sir Lawrence Bragg, later took the helm, and once gamely gripped the ankles of Yehudi Menuhin, so the yoga-loving violinist could do a headstand to relax before giving a Friday Evening Discourse. The subject of Menuhin’s talk? “Art and Science as Related Concepts”.

Given how much fraternising has gone on between artists and scientists, it’s curious that so many people now think of them as decidedly different beasts. In the progression of this idea, a lurch occurred in 1959, when the novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture lamenting the gulf that had opened up between what he called the “two cultures” of art and science. Scientists ignored the arts, Snow argued, and artists ignored the sciences, while the general public went with the artists. This launched the so-called “two cultures” debate, which was one of the intellectual controversies of the 20th century, with artists and scientists wrangling over which of them contributed more to society. As I learn from the UCL science historian Frank James, the Royal Institution also played its part.

Lawrence Bragg knew Snow, and it was during one of their regular train trips together from Cambridge to London, Prof. James tells me, that the two men developed the ideas behind Snow’s lecture, as well as coming up with the “two cultures” phrase itself.

All the mudslinging that ensued now feels rather antique. Yet a key question underlying the controversy remains: what, if anything, do artists and scientists have in common? To which the answer I would give, as someone with a foot in either camp, is that both are dealers in patterns.

At first glance, the universe seems chaotic. But scientists have a knack for spotting patterns: rules, symmetries and analogies that allow us to make predictions and operate more effectively. Artists, meanwhile, respond to the chaos by inventing alternative worlds whose patterns are easier to spot. Rhyme, metre and assonance give the words of a poem a special sense of rightness. A painting glows with the particular care that has gone into its arrangement.

Moreover, art has the effect of temporarily sharpening our pattern-spotting facilities. After we read a poem or gaze at a painting, the world seems more meaningful. That’s because we’re briefly better at spotting the patterns in reality. For a demonstration, notice the way, at an art exhibition, the faces of the other visitors look so interesting. That’s not because only people with interesting faces visit galleries. It’s because, once we step through the door, our facility for spotting reality’s patterns is turned up to the max. Art, in this sense, makes us scientists.

“I think you’re missing something here,” says my colleague, the physicist Evgeny Sobko, in response to my theory. For Dr Sobko, there is a touching-point between art and science in the realm of patterns, but there’s more to it than that. The biggest insights come from breaking the mould. “When you’re spotting patterns, you’re playing a game with fixed rules. But the really cool thing is to create a new game. That’s the greatest science. That’s the greatest art.” Dr Sobko points out that when a survey was done to find the most influential artist of the 20th century, the winner was Marcel Duchamp, a man who overturned our very idea of what art is.

Another colleague, the AI expert Mikhail Burtsev, suggests that when artists embark on a project, they often feel as if they are tackling a problem, much as scientists do in their work. As with Dr Sobko, the examples he gives are revolutionary artworks, as opposed to everyday ones. “Consider Malevich’s Black Square,” he says. “It was created to solve a particular problem Malevich faced as a painter. He was deconstructing art to find the most basic element. His answer was the black square.” Dr Burtsev goes on to point out a further commonality between art and science: the first-past-the-post imperative. “If you paint a black square today,” he observes, “or discover the Pythagorean theorem, no one cares.”

As it happens, Dr Burtsev’s vision of art as a type of problem-solving echoes an argument that was made by the painter John Constable in his Friday Evening Discourse of 1836. Painting, said Constable, is a kind of scientific “enquiry into the laws of Nature”. The paintings are the artist’s “experiments”. And just as scientific experiments may or may not support the scientist’s conjecture, not all paintings will succeed in communicating the artist’s vision.

This is an interpretation that also resonates with the artist Graham Fink, who was once a head honcho at the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather. “When I first visited you guys at the London Institute,” he tells me, “I thought we were worlds apart. But the more we talk, the more I see the overlap. When I’m working, I start with a sketch pad and scribble and edit my way forward. You do the same thing with your beautiful blackboards that cover your walls. So we both muddle our way forward, until we feel we have something. And we just know it when we do.”

For Talulah Riley, the author and actor (Pride and Prejudice) whose passion for physics led her to become one of our trustees, the overlap between art and science is “the ability to link data points in unique and interesting ways”. At the same time, she laments an aesthetic decline in modern science. “Gone are the days of Faraday and Babbage and friends, and the glorious aesthetic of Victorian ingenuity, when proto-computers were made of wood and brass and spat out magical results. That’s one of the things I like about the London Institute. It looks good and it feels good. It’s a non-threatening environment for creative types. I like the blackboards. The suite of rooms is beautiful, and the great science-characters it houses are ecumenical, kind and generous towards any artistic interlopers. Visits feed my soul as well as my mind.”

If the primary game of science is spotting patterns, there’s an important secondary game, argues Dr Fink, which is about beauty

Mrs Riley is in the audience at the Wolfram event, which is hosted by our director Thomas Fink, a man who eschews casual attire at work. For him, the design of our rooms, the symmetry of our website and how our scientists present themselves are matters of vital importance. “Snow and Bragg were right to worry about artists getting all the love,” he argues. “This wasn’t a problem in Humphry Davy’s day. But by the mid-20th century, a self-reinforcing archetype took root: unworldly and oblivious of aesthetics. Artists became cool and scientists uncool. And we scientists bear a lot of the responsibility for this.”

If the primary game of science is spotting patterns, there’s an important secondary game, argues Dr Fink, which is about beauty. “The most striking thing about physics and maths is how beautiful they are. How we describe our discoveries should reflect this. Because it’s a myth that an abstract theory speaks for itself. The medium matters — the language, the pictures, the clean or crooked lines of reasoning.” Dr Fink turns Constable’s analogy on its head: “Our research papers are our paintings. We should create them with the care and craft of an artist.”

In the back row of our seminar room — the same room in which that 19th century scientific hero, Michael Faraday, used to write up his groundbreaking insights into electromagnetism — Mrs Riley is accompanied by her newborn baby, Timothy; her husband, the actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster (The Queen’s Gambit); and her friend, the actor David Thewlis (Naked). Chatting to Thewlis earlier, I confessed to suffering from impostor syndrome, owing to my lack of a science degree. “I certainly won’t be asking a question at the end of the talk,” I told him.

Now that the question-and-answer session of the Wolfram event is underway, and scientists are taxing the speaker with a series of scientific questions, Thewlis catches my eye, and makes an ironic gesture as if to say: now’s your chance. Taking the bait, I tentatively raise my hand. “In what way,” I ask Dr Wolfram, “is mathematics an artistic endeavour?”

His answer has two parts. The first is that nothing forces scientists to focus on this or that area of study. “An awful lot of the preference about what to do is aesthetic,” says Dr Wolfram. The second part is a corollary. The mathematics that we have isn’t the discovery of laws that exist on some Platonic plane. It’s our own creation. “Set theory, for example, is a choice that we make. We’re constructing this thing, which is sort of a reflection of our mind.”

If artists show us a world that looks more meaningful than ordinary life, scientists show us that ordinary life is more meaningful than it looks

People often assume physicists are atheists. But with my pattern-spotting preoccupation, I would not be so sure. The awareness of the pattern-richness of the universe, which is realised most deeply by the physicist, has the potential to be a religious experience. For why should the universe be as rich in patterns as it is? Dr Wolfram, however, thinks that these patterns may be somehow created by us. God, then, or the sense of a god, could be rooted in the art of science.

If artists show us a world that looks more meaningful than ordinary life, scientists show us that ordinary life is more meaningful than it looks. These are the benefits they confer on mankind. This is why it is fitting that they are both being honoured with awards in Stockholm today.