Let’s get on with creativity. Let me tell
you the reason. So this is a sort of book
tour and this story fits, you’re absolutely
right, inter-disciplinarity is my life. I’ve
always hated divisions, I’ve always respected
them as being artificial and briefly I was
pro-Vice Chancellor of Research at Durham
and what I enjoyed there very much was much
more exploring bridges between disciplines
than necessarily, you know, working with disciplines
themselves. Who am I to do that? But I have
to say that after working in inter-disciplinary
thinking and projects for years and years,
please keep eating the crisps, I mean I’m
sure the sound system will not pick up the
odd crunch and I won’t be – so providing
you bring a few down here for me I don’t
mind at all.
But I have to say, I’ve changed my metaphor
for interdisciplinarity. Oh, that’s so kind.
[laughing] Now this will be picked up by the
sound system. I’ve changed my metaphor – I
didn’t want you to take that seriously.
Send them round, quick. Don’t do this. That’s
bad isn’t it? Not working well. So interdisciplinarity,
I used to think of it as building super-structures
across the islands between these separated
islands of our disciplines. Lovely bridges,
lovely roads, but after working between Physics
and Chemistry, and Physics and Chemical Engineering,
then Physics and Biology, then Physics and
History and Theology and English and Literature,
I’ve changed my view on this. I think the
metaphor is entirely wrong because when we
get to the heart of what we know and love
about our disciplines, our scholarships, our
studies, our knowledge, I find that when we
explore these spaces between us, rather than
building bridges between us I think we’re
digging down to a common foundational core.
It’s much more like these islands are on
a planet and the deeper we dig, the closer
we come together and it’s discovering the
innate unity of knowledge and scholarship
that we have artificially split up rather
than, as it were, a sticking plaster, a literally
superficial idea of bridging between disciplines.
I wasn’t planning on saying something so
deep just to start with but it must have been
the introduction of the conversation.
Let’s get on with this. So that is why I
find it – let’s for the people this side,
let’s see if we can do this as well – so
one of the things I enjoy most about being
an academic is actually get out of the university
and visiting schools. I’ve very much enjoyed
particularly visiting sixth forms because
for independent study days for example, you
know, something on faith and religion, I’m
interested in that, that will never go away,
they love that, of course they do. But art
and science, science history, and then I’ll
sometimes ask ‘well what are you studying?’
and some of them will be doing only humanities
subjects, some only science and that’s fine,
I wouldn’t blame anyone for choosing English,
History or French. Fabulous subjects. But
tell me, because after working with these
young people for a while, you can spot who
are the really bright ones who could have
done anything at sixth form, you know they
could and they know they could. So you tell
me, just tell me why you didn’t do Physics
or Biology or Mathematics, which you could
have done. Now, when you ask that question
of the really bright kids who are criticising
and on everything you’re saying and tearing
it apart and they’re thinking about it,
they don’t say ‘because it’s not my
favourite subject’ or ‘because I wasn’t
that good at that’. They say this, they
say ‘because I couldn’t see any room for
my creativity’ or perhaps they’ll use
the word ‘imagination’, in science and
a hot knife goes through and I think what
have we done in our education system to describe
both in our public media, our commons, and
in our education that science is something
to do with learning facts, an established
body of knowledge and there’s nothing imaginatory
or exploratory about it, because those of
you who are scientists who will have experienced
this a bit, well look our job is to re-imagine
the universe. You cannot deduce the structure
of atoms of the behaviour of Black Holes.
You can’t read that off the instruments.
The work of a scientist is the work of a huge
centuries’ long work of human imagination.
So why have we got lost on this?
So, you know, I decided to start a project
and it turned into a book and I discovered
some things on the way which really surprised
me and so I’ll tell you – we won’t have
time, fortunately, for the whole story because
I want to leave a good 35, 40 minutes at the
end to have a proper discussion, but I’ll
tell you some of the things that I learnt.
It will ask more questions than it asks but
that’s good and it will give you a little
bit of a flavour and if you want to know the
gory details, of course you can always do
the Amazon thing or buy the book.
Now, so one thing I discovered of course is
that this touches on a subject which I know
is close to your hearts, or a metaphor which
is close to your hearts in this Liberal Arts
programme, the two cultures. So a shadow lies
across all debates about where creativity
lies and does it lie or not in the sciences?
Is it the province of the Arts? Have you noticed
by the way that our language has been changing
the last few years? That we started to call
some subjects the ‘Creative Subjects’.
Have you also noticed in the last very few
years that organisations have started identifying
class, or even jobs, in their staff as ‘creatives’?
Ooh, dangerous. Don’t like it. Anyway, C.P.
Snow, it’s the Two Cultures all over again.
I don’t need to read you that passage, it’s
famous, I’m sure you’ve all read the Reith
Lectures and his book. He complained that
our country is ruled by people who’ve gone
to Winchester and Baliol – even then, oh
my goodness – and PPE and, you know, if
you don’t know Shakespeare you’re not
cultured, you’re an anathema. But if you
don’t know the Second Law of Thermo-dynamics,
which is just as important cultural gift of
scholarship in our times then who cares? That
was the 20th Century shadow.
But of course there’s a 19th Century shadow
as well. Now I love the Romantic poets as
well as anyone in this room, I expect, but
they have an ambiguous relationship with the
developing discourse around science. I’m
sure you’ll know, William Wordsworth had
some very interesting things to say that we’ll
come across later I think. But John Keats,
a medic, a trained doctor, in this long poem
‘Lamia’ – I won’t ask how many of
you have read the whole of the long poem,
‘Lamia’, but I’m sure many of you will
know this short most famous excerpt from it.
It’s where he calls science ‘cold’.
Philosophy, of course natural Philosophy is
science, and Keats’ message, which is similar
to that of Edgar Allan Poe, is that science
extracts the wonder, the mystery, the question,
the delight, out of the world. We once had
a rainbow, a wonderful rainbow, an awful rainbow.
We knew her texture but now philosophy has
unwoven this rainbow, it clips an angel’s
wings, conquers the mysteries, it de-spiritualises
the world. So this imaginative musey matter
on which poets, artists thrive is somehow
vacuumed away. They are the, for those of
you who are a lover of the Harry Potter books
or films, science keeps the great Dementor
of the world. They suck all the happiness
out of it.
[laughing]
Oh dear. But this goes back further, the 18th
Century shadow. So even in the cradle of early
Modernism, something is going on. Now Blake
happens to be my favourite poet. I don’t
know why, you just know this don’t you?
I just adore Blake and his pictures. But he
wasn’t a friend of Newton, logic, positivism,
rationality at all, and it’s Blake – this
is the earliest attestation I can find to
this opposition of natural and other philosophy
and creation. ‘My business’ says Blake
‘is not to reason and compare – my business
is to create’, and here’s Blake drawing
Newton, oblivious of the wonder of the world
around him. This is the engraving which gives
rise to the sculpture, the modern sculpture
outside the British Library on Marylebone
Road. Many of you will know it. But Blake
depicts Newton – I don’t think he realises
he’s at the bottom of a sea here, he’s
not even in the air. I do a bit of scuba diving
and I don’t know how Blake knew this but
this really does look very much like an anemone-encrusted
rock.
So this is a bit grim isn’t it? You’re
all looking a bit sad and I’m feeling a
bit sad now. But there are other stories,
there are other voices that can take us throughout
those times. Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace is
a very interesting person of course, she’s
the daughter or Lord Byron and she wrote poetry
herself and of course was a wonderful mathematician,
worked with Charles Babbage on the mathematics
behind early computing. In her biographical
writings she says that when she wanted to
get herself into a state of mind to write
poetry, the best personal practice was to
spend a week doing mathematics first. And
then she describes how imagination works in
science. Look, the ‘wings of imagination’,
‘those who have learned to walk on the threshold
of unknown worlds, by means of that are commonly
termed par excellence the exact sciences’.
Now, they’ve missed a trick, so I got York
to call my new chair ‘natural philosophy’.
If only I’d come across this quotation by
Lovelace first I’d have gotten them to call
me the chair of ‘those who walk on the threshold
of the unknown worlds’. Much more romantic,
right?
In our own times I’m sure many of you will
know this old geezer, Richard Feynman, one
of my favourite Physicists although not in
every dimension, I have to say, but still
he’s extraordinarily imaginative pillar
of 20th Century science and in his autobiography
– in fact in the Horizon programme which
is in one of the BBC iPlayer archives, they
have about 10 programmes which are the best
science programmes of all time – Feynman
talking to camera, head to camera, one frame,
50 minutes, it’s a fantastic programme.
He talks about this discussion he had with
an artist who said ‘you scientists, you
just explain everything and there’s no wonder
left’ and Feynman responds and I’m not
sure this is true. He says ‘I may not appreciate
the aesthetics of a flower to as high a degree
as you, my artist friend, but I think I see
it beautifully. I think I can detect the beauty
in a flower or a sunset, but when I look at
a flower I don’t just consider the petals,
I think about the cells and the structure
of the lipid membranes, the mechanics of the
cell, the nucleus, the DNA that codes the
structure of the cells. I see beauty and structure
at many different scales inside this object.
So I don’t understand why you think that
my science subtracts from your objects of
wonder and my sources of the wonders of the
world. I only see that it adds’.
We’d better ask Einstein sooner or later
and Einstein said this about imagination,
like most things Einstein said – if any
of you can tell me what he meant, I’d be
ever so grateful but he’s obviously keen
on imagination I suppose to knowledge. So,
OK, we’ve visited a few ancient sources
there. We’ve got two very different narratives
around creativity, the imagination, science
and loosely, the arts. Let’s talk about
some people who practice this today. Let’s
meet a few.
So one of them is a man, this is Ken Hay.
So when I was at Leeds, I was Professor at
Leeds for many years – Ken Hay was Professor
of Fine Art; I think he still is there and
one of the nice things about the Leeds History
and Fine Art department is that all the professors
are artists themselves and Ken is a mixed
media artist and I remember early in my days
there, sitting down with him in the senior
common room – never mind about the drawing
on the right, he doesn’t look like that
anymore but he did then – and I asked him
‘I’d really be interested to know as a
scientist how you as an artist goes about
your projects. I mean how do you start? Where
do the ideas come from? How do you set yourself
goals? How do you then proceed? Tell me a
story. Tell me a story’ and so Ken told
me a story of a recent art project of his
which is called ‘Stalingrad’ and what
he was trying to do was he had some grainy
photographs taken at the appalling Eastern
Front Second World War Battle of Stalingrad
with soldiers on both sides were freezing
to death and starving, but they were very
poor photographs and he wanted to add to the
photographs, he wanted to pain what he called
backgrounds to history that would help viewers
eyes settle on the photograph, help them see
more of the suffering and the pointlessness,
rather than just think well that’s a bad
photograph.
So OK, that’s a really lovely idea, I see
where that idea comes from and he said ‘I
had an idea and I thought about the sort of
colour scheme and the patterns that would
work so I set to and I tried it out and it
didn’t work’. Oh, that’s interesting,
it didn’t work. I thought anything you tried
in art worked. No, very naïve in those days,
I was very naïve. So he told me about this
series of hypotheses and experimental hypothesis
testing, in the studio – that’s my language
for it but it’s appropriate language – and
after a few minutes I said ‘well Ken’..
and he said ‘well eventually’, he said
he had to displace the symmetry, so he eventually
found the colour scheme. These don’t do
justice at all but you see he put the photographs
off to one side and the eye is continuously
drawn. It does have a rest from the photograph
but the colours bring it back and this blood
red field of poppies brings you back and there’s
others that bring the eye in different directions.
I said ‘look, you know, I can transpose
some of the language into a science project
and much of it would map, much of it would
map. But we’re not very good at telling
our stories. We’re very good at giving you
the final polished account but not very good
at the narrative with the twists and tails’.
So I told a story, that’s what the diagram
on the right is and some of you will recognise
this is a soft matter cartoon. I worked for
many years on the – so here’s the soft
matter bit – on the problem of sticky fluids.
A fluid whose molecular composition was molecular
strings – we call them polymers or macro-molecules
– and they tangle together like a bowl of
noodles or spaghetti on a microscopic scale
and there are properties that emerge from
this. But imagine this, the cartoon on the
top is this horrendously complicated system.
How could you do physics with such a complicated
system? And a few people – Dujene and Doyne
and Edwards in the 60s and 70s – had this
idea that by focusing on what it is like to
be an individual polymer, what are the constraints
on one string, the rest of this complex surrounding
of many stringy bodies can be replaced very
appropriately by a sort of tube that hems
you in, because you can easily snake along
your length. That’s how we eat spaghetti
politely, but you can’t move sideways in
a tube and you can do the mathematics for
this and so develop it but there’s a story
of many, many twists and tails.
So we actually mounted an exhibition on these
parallel stories that no-one came to but we
had great fun mounting it in Leeds at the
British Association of Advanced Meta-Science.
But that started me on a series of conversations.
So what I wanted to do was to ask – so here’s
the project – I spent three or four years
going to scientists, mathematicians, biologists,
engineers, and asking them ‘tell me the
story’, and asking myself ‘where do ideas
come from? How do you bring, how do you create
a new? Tell me the false starts, tell me the
frustrations as well as the – tell me the
wrong turnings as well as the right turnings’.
And then because I believe in proper controlled
experiments I kept on asking artists and musicians
and poets and writers about their story of
creativity as well and the book that I said
to OUP I would write has a series of chapters
on all the nice science and mathematics stories
about how scientists think and where creativity
comes from, a series of chapters on how musicians
and artists and poets write, and a lovely
undergraduate essay as a final chapter that
sort of bridges between the two. And the other
thing you just discover when you write books
is sometimes the book – in fact whenever
you do anything creative – the object itself
talks back to you and the book said ‘you
can’t write me, that’s not how the world
is and the stories don’t divide that way’.
So I’m now going to give you the top level
summary of what I discovered, in two slides
and one’s a synchronic slide and one’s
a diachronic slide.
Here's a synchronic slide, that I think you
can divide modes of creative or imaginative
thinking but those modes don’t divide between
the arts, the humanities and the sciences.
They divide in different ways and their modalities
cross between what we know term the – I
think there are many ways of dividing it;
my scheme has got three. It’s got disadvantages,
it doesn’t work entirely well but it works
OK. So I’ll tell you what they are. One
is the visual. So obviously, you know, visual
artists think visually. They think visually
because they then have to create visually,
but many scientists, and a good many mathematicians,
think visually as well. Far more than they
think theoretically or with symbols or anything
like that. Not all, some just think with symbols,
it turns out. It’s interesting but you have
to get under their skin to find this out.
And of course visual thinking is also a metaphor
for the creation of understanding. What do
we say all the time when we first understood
something? ‘Oh I see’. It’s the archetypal
sensory metaphor and it turns out that as
a metaphor it has a slightly prickly history
in phenomenological philosophy as well. Anyway,
so that’s visual.
However, some people actually think in language
and words. Not everyone. There has been from
time to time a big battle over whether, you
know, Wichtenstein was involved in this so
do you have to have language in order to think?
The answer by the way is no, you don’t.
You can argue with me later! [laughing] OK,
some of you are going to argue with me later!
No sorry, you don’t. But some people do.
The point is some people really do think with
language, or some people have modes of thinking.
Poets and novelists clearly but it turns out
that there is a fascinating and surprising
entangled story between the novel and fictional
writing and experimental method in science.
That was interesting. We’ve got some time,
I’ll tell you briefly about that story because
it gives the example of digging down deeper
into the project.
And then there’s a third mode of creative
thinking which is itself a bit of a surprise
because you’d have thought that if I’m
in a place where there’s nothing to see
and nothing to write, there’s no words,
there’s no pictures, then what do I have
to work with to create or imagine? The answer
is this is where the abstract transcendent
spaces of music and mathematics live and I
unapologetically have an apophatic approach,
a negative, via negative, to music and mathematics.
Far too much has been said far too glibly
about the obvious links between music and
mathematics. I don’t think there are anything
obvious to say about music and mathematics.
You know, Jessica’s a really good clarinet
player, she’s obviously going to be brilliant
at mathematics. You hear it all the time,
but I think there is something going on and
I’ll say something about that.
Right, that’s the synchronic little picture
and we’ll have time to say a little bit
more about those. What I don’t have time
to say more about other than the overview
is the diachronic story which I’ve hinted
at before; it’s the narrative, it’s Ken’s
story, it’s Ken’s story about Stalingrad
art, it’s my story about the sticky polymers.
I’ve heard this story so many times in so
many different ways and I’m not saying that
everyone’s story of bringing the new idea
to fruition is the same, but when you’ve
collected them all you see a pattern and it
goes something like this. For some reason
or other you have an initial idea, you have
a vision, but it’s a misty vision of something
you want to do. It could be a piece of physics,
it could be a theory in mathematics, it could
be a string quartet, it could be a poem about
a flower or a black hole. It could be a play,
it could be anything. You know, it could be
organising a family holiday. I don’t want
to be sort of particularly academic and snobby
about this, you know, creating things that
don’t exists and solving problems in order
to bring that new thing about. All sorts of
people do it in all sorts of everyday circumstances
as well. But the point is it’s an unclear
vision. If it were clear you’d have solved
the problem. But the first, the next thing
that happens is the idea itself, the sight,
the mental sight, elicits a desire. It is
its emotional energy. You really want to do
this, you really want that PhD, which is a
good thing when you think about it, because
if you didn’t really want to, we would all
give up in Year 2 if we didn’t have this
emotional desire to get to the end point and
solve our problem or produce our results.
So notice one thing straight away, this is
another leitmotif to come off this story,
whether they were mathematicians, physicists,
playwrights or whoever. You could not tease
the cognitive from the emotional, the thought
from the affect. Everyone’s story of creativity
brings emotion and effect and condition together
and you cannot tease them apart. There’s
an emotive energy which drives all creative
acts. And the mathematicians, you might think
the pure mathematicians are the most emotional
about this and by the way, if you want proof
of this, go back to BBC iPlayer, go back to
the Horizon programme archive and pull out
the one on Fermat’s Theorem which later
became a book, produced this lovely piece
with Andrew Wilds who solved Fermat’s Last
Theorem and it opens with Andrew Wilds, straight
to camera, just talking for the, I don’t
know, 250th time about the moment where he
finally under public exposure having published
a fallacious proof after working in silence
at Princeton, under cover for 7 years to solve
this one thing – couldn’t do it here REF
and all that – and the morning he saw the
most beautiful mathematical connection deep
line which would allow him to solve it, and
he still cannot finish the sentence because
he breaks down in tears, just the memory of
it and so this is a Cambridge Princeton pure
mathematician. So there we go.
There’s a series of attempts to create it
and, you know, the weightlifting guinea pig
says it all really, you know, this is hard
to do, no-one’s done this stuff before.
This is new and most of it fails over and
over again because you bash against constraints,
like Ken did, like I did. The complications
don’t agree with the data. And then, so
very often you give up and maybe giving up
is the right thing to do, at least temporarily.
You have a rest, go onto something else for
a few hours, days, weeks, months even. You
go for a walk in the mountains and then, you
know, if you’re lucky – it doesn’t always
happen quickly, it sometimes happens very
slowly – but sometimes there are these ah-ha
moments. If I had a fiver for everyone who
said ‘I was getting off a bus when..’.
It’s extraordinary. It really happens a
lot. People get off – they walk through
doors and they have an idea that arrives as
if effortlessly but you realise that you wouldn’t
have had this effortless ‘oh yeah, I’ll
try that’. This is why people talk of the
muse, it’s as if someone’s whispered in
your ear, but of course it’s not that. What’s
actually going on is that the subconscious
area of our brains that we are not aware,
are actually very creative places. They’re
working on stuff all the time and we do hard
work to input to those places and those moments
where creative nuclei of ideas surface from
those depths, are very rare and I have a theory
for why by the way you get them coming off
buses, but I won’t tell you that. Amateur
psychology. You be an amateur at inter-disciplinary
stuff, it’s very bad for you, you end up
being an amateur at everything, which is terrible.
And then of course there’s a final aesthetic
emotional response to this which is great
joy, and a final emotional response at the
end. So there’s this weaving of emotion
which we should be much more honest about.
In fact the proof of the pudding here is one
of the chapters for the book, the one I’m
about to tell you about in the section after
next about the novel and experimental science,
I wrote as a visiting Fellow to the Institute
of Advanced Studies at the University of Notre
Dame. If you’ve ever been, if you ever get
the chance to be a Fellow at an IES, do. It’s
just great. You can work on whatever you want
to and there’s only one of you, there was
one physicist and there was a theologian,
there was a film studies theorist, there was
a medieval arts historian, there was an equestrian
historian. I mean it was a great mix and the
only rules are you have to go to each other’s
seminars twice a week and engage with the
discussion and after that you do what you
like.
And there was an historian whose name was
Patrick who I was really looking forward to
hearing my seminar, so I’d just got to the
point where I’d got this story, I’d extracted
this pattern and I wanted to just present
this as a framework on which to ask ‘can
you hang scientific creativity, mathematical
creativity, artistic creativity, on this story?’.
I told the story and then we had a nice discussion
but Patrick didn’t say anything at all and
I was desperately disappointed, not in him
but in me. I thought this is all illusory,
I’ve failed completely. If I can’t get
a question out of him – and he always asks
a good question – I’ve failed to communicate
or he’s being polite. I know, I’m doing
something completely trivial, you know, imposter
syndrome, breaks out all over in hives and
so I go home miserable. The next morning there’s
a knock on my little office door and there’s
Patrick. ‘Oh, hi Patrick’, ‘hi Tom.
Just wanted to say thank you for your seminar
yesterday’, ‘oh, very good, thank you’,
‘and sorry I didn’t ask a question’,
‘oh’, ‘but you made me think and reflect
so hard on what you said I was in some degree
of mental turbulence’, ‘oh my goodness’,
‘because you told me the story of my life
as an academic historian, as if you knew what
it was like to be an academic historian, which
you obviously don’t – well not directly
because you are one – you’re a physicist’,
‘that’s right, Patrick’, ‘no but when
I get’ – it was the stuff I said about
the threading of the emotions up and down,
the positives and the negatives with the cognitive
effect – he said ‘within my history I
can explain something, when it’s all fitting
with my theories, I get so excited and I get
very very high. But when I cannot make sense
of my data, when none of my models work, I
get very very low’. He said ‘I’ve honestly
thought that I might be bipolar. But hey,
you’ve told me it’s just life’. So I
thought to myself well, if this project has
kept one academic historian of Prozac then
my job is done here.
But it just told me how we’re so shy about
this. We don’t tell each other our stories
of academic creativity and this is a humanities
scholar talking about it. Of course academic
history is creative. Right, so that’s creative
narrative. I don’t have time to tell you
any more stories about the story because I’ve
got a little bit of time to tell you a bit
about those three categories and then we’re
done.
So a bit more about the visual. Einstein again,
it’s an example of a very theoretical physicist
who thought visually. His maths comes to him,
he says, very very painfully, after he’s
thought visually, and I wanted to write about
impressionism. Not only because I love Monet
– well who doesn’t? I know it’s very
dull to love Monet but I just do. But after
reading the art critic, Clement Greenberg,
I realised why as a theoretical physicist
I liked impressionists so much, and it’s
when I read the little things he says about
what was really new about what Monet and his
contemporaries were doing, was that they were
making the canvas an object worthy of an artistic
inspection in its own right, as well as being
representative of the world beyond. I thought
ah-ha, that’s why I love this, because as
a theoretical physicist, the double vision
one has to have in one’s work at the same
time is to be aware that the model you’re
building is not the world. It’s the canvas
that you’re painting a working mathematical
model of the world and the connection is perhaps
tenuous at time, tighter at others, but the
information on the world can be representative,
it can be implied, like this lovely sunset.
You know that the sun’s setting, you can’t
see the sun but look at how the pine trees
are underlit with this fiery russet and you
know the sun is setting on the horizon on
the right. You know it's red. Actually you
know the top of the sun is yellow because
of its light on the glass. You know much more
– and this of course is a terrible reproduction
but when you’re in the Philadelphia Museum
of Art in FRONT of this picture, those trees
move in the breeze. You think I’m kidding?
Well, let’s think about vision.
Plato thought that vision was not to do, as
we think, with rays of light coming into the
eye from outside. Plato thought that we cast
vision rays onto objects deliberately. So
how come you can’t see in a dark room then,
Plato? Well he thought about that, he knew
that one had to be light around and it’s
in our language now, we cast glances around,
I’m looking at you. And of course one of
the big objections to the intromissive theory
of vision is the confusion. If it were true
that your eyes were receiving light from every
possible place, location, in your field of
view, all you’d get is a confused mess.
You’d never be able to see any object out.
So there’s Plato and if you don’t believe
me, yeah, this is Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s ‘Rotating
Snakes’. Who sees motion? Put your hand
up if you see a bit of motion there. Great.
Not everyone. Who doesn’t see anything moving?
Oh, there’s one or two. It’s not your
fault, it’s all interesting, you don’t
see anything moving? But everyone else sees
a little rotation here. Now the people who
see rotation – yeah, yeah, don’t look.
Do you want me to move on? Wow, OK, let me
move on, let me move on. Sorry about this.
I’ll move back for a moment. There is no
rotation. Of course, some of you will think
it’s a moving gif but they’re very, very
interesting illusions. There is no motion
in that picture. Your brain is projecting
motion onto the picture. I just wanted to
convince you that extramission is right, or
at least half right. When you consider the
whole perceptual train, we are psychologically
projecting possible interpretations of our
visual world as much as we are meeting with
incoming rays half way. So that’s why vision
is such a suitable metaphor for imaginative
creativity because half of it is imagined
anyway. You ask any police officer who interviews
people ‘what they saw at an incident’.
We know – I’m sorry, I’m going to go
briefly through that. Close your eyes. On
we go.
So visual stories, here’s my own visual
story. I now work on the soft matter of Biology
and I remember a slight daydream which led
to a 10 year research project. So I remember
seeing at a lecture this, which is a biological
diagram of a protein binding to DNA. You can
see the double helix of the short section
of DNA, you can see a ribbon diagram of a
protein, but one of the gifts that I think
physics can bring to biology – this is another
talk here – is that biology for good reasons
has developed over the 20th Century particularly,
a mantra that structure gives function. And
of course it comes from Crick and Watson and
the structure of DNA and Max Perouts and the
structure of proteins and all that, but any
soft matter physicist knows that at the nano
scale, matter isn’t like that. Matter’s
like this. All structure is compromised the
entire time by this seething, chaotic, thermal,
motion we called heat. It’s called ‘Brownian
Motion’. And I remember what I ‘saw’
extromissively when I intromissively saw that
15 years ago at a graduate seminar, is this.
Now this later was concretised in – actually
it’s a simulation done by David Burns in
the Chemistry Department of Durham, later
of this same protein at room temperature and
it is indeed seething about – but this idea
of how this noisy environment could sustain
propagation of information transfer rather
than interrupt it was a source of visual imaginative
energy to me.
And I suppose, let’s go back to Einstein,
I mean one of the most beautiful gifts, cultural
gifts, of the 20th Century, I wouldn’t have
gone with C.P Snow for second law of thermal
dynamics, I’d have gone for Einstein’s
general relativity. I’d have gone for ‘Gravity
is Curvature’, ‘Gravity is Geometry’.
Anyone can understand curvature, round things
and curved things and pits and the fact that
we can think of this common captivating force
of gravity as to the curvature of space and
time I think is a beautiful gift and of course
entirely visual.
Now it turns out that somebody who was at
my earlier lecturer today will have already
met him. This is Robert Grosseteste, the most
influential scientist you’ve never heard
of. Some of you have heard of him. He wrote
about comets and light and colour and sound
and rainbows in the 1220s in the most extraordinary
way – and this was another talk – a set
of inter-disciplinary team of medieval scholars
and scientists of using medieval natural philosophy
as a source for ideation in science today.
Great surprise for us, we never expected that,
but it’s happened. Anyway, let me tell you
what he says in his commentary to Aristotle’s
scientific method. He uses an untranslatable
word, it’s ‘sollertia’, it’s James
of Venice’s translation of Aristotle’s
Greek which is really the scientific imagination,
or the Mind’s Eye, is the penetrating power.
Let’s read it, ‘a virtue of which the
mind’s eye does not rest on the outer surface
of an object, but penetrates to something
below the visual image. For instance, when
the mind’s eye falls on a coloured surface,
it does not res there, but descends to the
physical structure of which the colour is
an effect. It then penetrates this structure
until it detects the elemental qualities of
which the structure is itself an effect’.
Now I don’t think I’m being presentist
[sic] to say that Grosseteste prefigures Feynman
in what he says here. This is the human imagination,
confronting matter and refusing to be satisfied
with the superficial. And this is another
thing, this is another reason I love science.
I love science because it refuses to be satisfied
with a glance on the surface of the world,
but engages the powers of imagination because
what else can do this other than the – well,
what else can do it is the technology and
technical art, yes of course, and microscopy
and neutron [scattering - 0:39:03] and all
that – but that only is driven by imagination
to see beneath the structure of matter.
Now, by the way, I mentioned a few things.
You can get all philosophy [sic] here. Emmanuel
Levinas, a post-modern philosopher, interests
me very much, mounts a strong critique of
the visual metaphor which he says is imperialistic
and distancing. He prefers the auditory metaphor
for imagination. The ‘sound is like the
sensible quality overflowing its limits, the
incapacity of form to hold its content’.
Vision, he says, is imperialistic. I’ve
learnt recently that Nietzsche wrote about
the sense of smell as an appropriate metaphor
for ideation, but they we go. So there’s
a little bit of visual story that wets your
appetite. I’m going to go on for another
five minutes, is that OK? That will be 45
if I do that. Right.
I have to tell you this story about the textual
and then we’ll briefly look at the abstract.
OK, I claim that the scientific method and
the fictional writing are siblings, or perhaps
cousins. Well, let’s see if there might
be evidence for that. Let’s ask Jo Priestly,
Oxygen, that one, ‘works of fiction’,
he says ‘resembles those machines which
we contrive to illustrate the principles of
philosophy, such as globes and orreries’.
He says that without explanation in that lecture
as if it were obvious. Now take Iris Murdoch,
a great philosopher of our own times, writing
about the novel, ‘novelistic writing enables
an attention to the inexhaustible detail of
the world, the endlessness of the task of
understanding… and the apprehension of the
unique’. Substitute novelistic writing for
experimental science and run past that sentence
in your minds again.
Now, I have a huge debt of gratitude here
to Pat Waugh, a Professor of English at Durham
who said to me at the beginning of this project,
‘Tom you do realise don’t you that the
coincidental historical origin of the early
English novel and experimental method is not
a coincidence? Robinson Crusoe and Robert
Boyle’s Vacuum Pump have things in common’.
Well that’s interesting. What is going on
here? And part of what’s going on here is
actually apophatic again. So the thing about
the experimental method, I’ve come very
late in life to realise, is that it is just
not obvious that it should work. Now this
is why it’s so unfair to criticise the pre-moderns
or the medieval we talked about this afternoon
of not looking at medieval science through
the wrong end of the telescope, as if they
were stupid. Why didn’t they use experimental
methods? Well they were developing it hard,
but if you think about it, the world is a
complex, chaotic, myriad component, unpredictable
place. You’re telling me that if I put one
salt and one metal in a little glass test-tube,
I will learn something about that world? Go
on. That’s how I summarise the argument
in non-philosophical terms but you see, experiment
is something very artificial and very simplified.
And the best critique of experimental method
in the early modern period in this country
is Margaret Cavendish. Margaret Cavendish
was the first woman to attend a meeting of
the Royal Society, she’s an absolutely ace
natural philosopher and she also genders this
wonderfully. She basically says ‘these experiments
are toys for the boys’, you know, they’re
simple-minded, poor things, they need these
things but we girls can cope with the proper
philosophy and complexity. But she writes
that in her philosophical writings, notes
on experimental philosophy, but she also writes
a novel, arguably the first science fiction
novel that’s called ‘Blazing World’.
Blazing World is another world which you get
to by going to the North Pole and then you
can ride up on this other world, Philip Pullman.
The scientists and all the beings have animal
heads and the scientists, they have telescopes
and they have instruments, but their instruments
only serve to make their arguments worse,
they don’t resolve any disputes, and she
engages novelistically [sic] in this argument.
But in the literature itself, if you compare
what Daniel Defoe says about science and what
Robert Boyle says about the world. Robert
Boyle is talking about the world’s a great
book; a book which up till that point had
been read but which I think one of the things
that’s going on in early modern science
is that the nature as a great book motif,
is being turned into something we can write
on. There we go.
Daniel Defoe, writing about science, should
be a ‘publik blessing to all mankind’.
Both he and Boyle by the way would have been
very excited to have seen citizen science
projects. And look, can you see what’s going
on here? If you have the imaginative chutzpah
to think of writing a story about one man
being shipwrecked on a little island with
a few sheep, he’s given a few guns and a
little bit of ammunition left over and let’s
stand back and see what happens. Can you see
how there’s a zeitgeist about artificial
and simple situations from which we can learn
that span the novel and early modern science?
And again, if you want further evidence – I
won’t go into details here -but if you compare
for example Henry James’ collection of prefaces
of his novels called ‘The Art of the Novel’
where he talks about the stages of writing
a novel, that actually – I said I wouldn’t
go back to the story; I lie. The story comes
out again. I won’t go through the quotes
here but ideation, observation, incubation
of ideas; that’s when you can’t do it,
illumination; that’s the a-ha moment, verification;
that’s the series of work at the end. Move
on a generation, a physiologist called William
Beveridge, now I don’t necessarily agree
with everything he writes but the fact that
he writes a book called ‘The Art of Scientific
Investigation’ is really interesting. He’s
deliberately patterning it on James, who deliberately
patterns it on Horace ars poetica and uses
exactly the same language. So, let’s skip
over Humboldt and indeed Pat Waugh, Virginia
Waugh, The Lighthouse. But there’s lots
of gorgeous 19th and 20th century examples.
We’ll just quickly visit the third mode
and then we’re done, the abstract. It turns
out there is a great treasure trove of refection,
particularly French mathematicians, reflecting
on the mathematical process. Henri Poincaré
and Hadmard as well, towards the end of the
19th Century and early 20th Century, reflect
on where mathematical ideas come from and
they even do mathematics about this subject
and Poincaré thought that this subconscious
world that we mentioned was sorting out the
fruitful from the unfruitful ideas for us,
before the ah-ha moment, he thought maybe
all it does is just blindly go through different
combinations of ideas. He very quickly realised
that all convulatorics give you hyper-astronomical
numbers that no computing machine or thinking
machine could ever routinely list and exhaust,
and therefore our subconscious mind must also
be directed by some sort of aesthetics.
George Steiner talks of the allegory of mathematics
which is music and – but in terms of connecting
mathematics and musical ideas which are also
somehow transcendent, you can’t picture
them, my most profound insight as far as I’ve
got – I don’t think I’ve solved this
problem – came from Julian Horton. In the
same way that the Monet was my favourite Monet
and I had a morning with the European Curator
at the Philadelphia Museum, my favourite composer
is, no apologies for this, Robert Schumann.
A great year for Robert and Clara, last year,
and I just adore Schumann’s music, totally
underrated and also I’m a very, very amateur
French Horn player. Now Schumann was, I should
explain, not just a creator of music, he was
a creator of whole genres of music. He invented
the piano quintet by the way. There’s no
piano quintets before Schumann and it’s
the best ever. Some of his genres didn’t
catch on but there’s one genre that should
have caught on but no-one else could write
for it. Concerto for Four Horns and Orchestra;
it’s fantastic. If you don’t believe me,
Concerto for Four Horns and Orchestra, YouTube
has several great recordings. Fifteen minutes
of your life will not be better spent before
bedtime this evening. And it doesn’t exist,
there’s no analysis of it. So I really wanted
to talk about this piece of music but Julian
Horton was a musicologist at Durham and he
said ‘well actually, Tom, I have a project
on 19th Century symphonic music going on now;
why don’t we both sit down together for
a few afternoons and do the analysis?’,
so I saw a musicologist at work. That was
fascinating, looking at the keys and things.
At one point, Julian leans back and he says
‘do you know, it’s caused me to think
about this, what distinguishes composers of
the first rank is their ability to set up
strategic problems of harmony and to solve
them within the aesthetic project of the piece
of music’. That is interesting because the
way mathematicians prove theorems, you see
the theorems themselves are given or not but
the proofs are imagined and created and you
never get to the whole proof in one go, you
just create the next sub-problem for you.
It’s like which of these mountain passes
would be the one that would take me to my
goal? So there’s something going on there.
Of course other things that go on there is
that both musicians and mathematicians use
funny dots. Now they say that for every equation
you cut your sales of your book by half. I
don’t know if that goes with musical staves
as well, but I’m saying look, look, look,
look, look, it doesn’t matter if you can’t
read this stuff. You have to give examples
because these are the symbols by which symbolic
innovators work, and some people look at that
and say ‘oh, that’s clever’ and some
people see the four horns. So some people
can hear that and see this. This is diffusion
of particles and that’s four horns playing.
There are similarities. So I’m asking far
more questions in mathematics and music than
I’m answering.
Now, it’s time to stop. So I’m not going
to talk about thought and feeling. I’m going
to leave us with the title of the book, ‘Shakespeare
and Poetry’. So one person – well, several
people – I’ve just had a lovely thing
happen, there’s a whole issue of inter-disciplinary
science reviews which is a journal being devoted
to the book, which I’m on the editorial
board. But seven of the other editors are
writing reviews and I’m responding to them
and it’s going to make a really nice academic
discussion about inter-disciplinarity and
art and poetry and science. I’ll give you
a link for later on if you want to, when it’s
out. But several of them have said ‘trade
descriptions act, you didn’t talk about
poetry’ and it’s true, there isn’t a
chapter on poetry. But the reason that I say
the poetry of science is because of two things:
it’s because of the way poets work is to,
it’s the meeting isn’t it? It’s the
meeting of imaginative energy and conception
which on its own, uncontrolled and unformed
would leave a puddle of prose on the floor.
But that imaginative energy is met with the
confines and constraints of form, and constraint
as every artist and every scientist knows,
constraints are never destructive; constraints
are constructive, constraints are beautiful,
constraints are half the answer.
Why do you write a sonnet? Because you’re
so much in love you’d just be a mess if
all your words and emotions – you write
a sonnet when you’re deeply in love, I’m
sure you all do, because that’s the straight
jacket which will turn and sculpt our energies
into something beautiful that actually says
something. Now what could constitute greater
imaginative energy than the demand to re-imagine
the universe? And what could constitute a
tighter form than to make that imagination
conform to the universe that we observe? Which
is why when Shakespeare gives Theseus these
words when the lovers return in Act 5, Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Everyone is paired with their
right pair. So, ‘imagination bodies forth’
and turns ‘the forms of these things unknown
by the poet’s pen … giving to airy nothing
a local habitation and a name’ and I think
that that’s what science does.
At that point I will thank you for listening
to me babbling away so far and stop and hear
you say much more sensible things. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
