Blockchain Papers

Tom McLeish

THE POETRY AND MUSIC OF SCIENCE: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art by Tom McLeish. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 414 pages. Paperback; $16.95. ISBN: 9780192845375. *In this tour-de-force book, British physicist Tom McLeish finally comprehensively argues, in one dense volume, what so many scientists have been claiming piecemeal for centuries: that doing science often looks and feels like doing art. That is a broad, amorphous statement, of course, and scientists have not done a very good job of fully understanding this idea or selling it to the rest of the world. This carefully crafted volume must be the most exhaustive work in this area, treating the notion that the creative work of scientists and artists is extraordinarily similar, in that they both fundamentally involve an intimate passion for describing and representing the world around us. *This is not a book about beauty or wonder in science, but rather it examines how scientific ideas and theories come to a scientist's mind and find fruition as publishable science. The entire book juxtaposes literature and art with science and mathematics to help understand the creative process. One important impetus for writing the book, according to McLeish, was recent evidence that smart, capable high schoolers in England were choosing not to go into science because they believed it would not be nearly as fulfilling, creatively, when compared to work in the arts or humanities. McLeish, a Christian, succeeds in this book in showing that not only is creative thinking and experimenting necessary and "part of the chase" in science, but that it is also a natural fulfillment of our creative mandate as human beings made in the image of God. McLeish is also careful to give examples of "more-regular" science, rather than relying solely on the popular accounts of the creativity of exceptional geniuses; he trys to show that all scientists participate in this artistic-like creativity no matter what they are studying. *The first two chapters introduce the concepts of creativity and inspiration in science. McLeish begins an interaction with several important works that he draws on throughout the book: William Beveridge's The Art of Scientific Investigation from 1950, Henry James's The Art of the Novel, and Howard Gardner's 1993 work Creating Minds (one of many surveys of particularly creative individuals). Chapter 3, "Seeing the Unseen," is about visual imagination and its role in theory creation, artistic design, and general problem solving. Visual imagination is seeing things in the mind's eye, but it is obviously linked to actual sight and seeing the world, too. Surveying the history of thought in this area, McLeish ranges from Plato to Gregory of Nyssa, to the thirteenth-century polymath Robert Grosseteste, to the Italian painter Giotto, to Einstein, who said his theory creation and problem solving started with visual images in his mind, which often led to his famous gedanken experiments. Grosseteste is one of the main interlocutors for McLeish throughout the book, being an exemplar of someone having a broad view of thought and creative exploration, not just compartmentalizing a premodern understanding of the physical world from his theological and philosophical commitments. *Chapters 4 through 6 sequentially juxtapose each of the three main areas of scientific work (experiment, theory, and mathematics) with their natural counterpart in literature and music. Experimental science is akin to writing a novel (!?) in that both set up artificial worlds that are tested against the real world and help illuminate the real world. Theoretical science is akin to writing poetry, in that both re-imagine the universe within fixed constraints: poetry within a certain shaping but constraining form, and theoretical visions of what goes on "under" the natural world constrained by a necessary conformity to that world. Chapter 6 compares mathematical creativity with composing and listening to music--the two "wordless" human endeavors in the world of the abstract. *The book is ultimately a treatise on creativity, and as such applies not just to science and art, but to all human endeavors that require creativity. In the final two chapters (7 and 8), McLeish develops what he describes as an "Ur-narrative of creative experience." Starting with a four-step creative process taken from Graham Wallas's 1926 work The Art of Thought, he adds in three more important stages that emerge from his analyses. The seven steps are: vision, desire, industry, constraint, incubation, illumination, and verification. (McLeish has added in desire, industry, and constraint, along with switching Wallas's ideation to vision.) Chapter 7 deals with emotion and drive in scientific creation, and chapter 8 ponders the purpose of human creativity, the telos that ultimately drives scientists and artists to such great lengths in pursuing their creative work. McLeish brings the imago Dei front and center, drawing on the two great hymns in the Book of Job, "Voice from the Whirlwind" (Job 38-42) and "Hymn to Wisdom" (Job 28), as guides to understanding the creative impulse to understand creation. In this he draws on his previous volume with Oxford, Faith and Wisdom in Science. *I believe that listing all the scientific works that McLeish describes in detail with regard to the creative elements behind the works is a good way to convey the magisterial scope of this intellectually rich book. Topics that get 2-10 pages each of description include Feynman's theory of beta decay, McLeish's own considerable contribution to viscous flow in branched polymer melts and his idea of entropically based allostery in biology, Belgian scientist Jan Vermant's work in mesoscale properties of "living matter" (which involves cellular-based material science), "collective phenomenon" and its original invocation by Pierre Weiss in 1907 to explain ferromagnetism, the centuries-long premodern controversy over the nature of sight (intromissive vs. extramissive, etc.), the recent evidence of a star being destroyed by a black hole, Boyle's contributions to the founding of modern experimental science, Alexander von Humboldt's important contributions to the value of a wholistic, multilevel vision of nature and science, Emmy Noether's astonishing discovery of the theoretical origin of conservation laws in physics, the discovery of the all-important fluctuation-dissipation theorem over 30 years (inaugurated by Einstein in 1905, applied to electrical noise by Nyquist in 1928, and fully generalized by Callen and Welton in 1951), the recent development at Caltech of a jet fuel polymer additive that greatly inhibits explosions of jet fuel (motivated in part by the horror of the fuel explosions on 9/11), and finally the full discovery of what causes rainbows by Theodoric in ca. 1310. The descriptions of these historic achievements are each fascinating in their own right and very readable--they alone, for me, would justify an investment in this book. When they are paired with a similar creative work from art, poetry, or fiction, the juxtaposition is extremely fruitful, though the philosophical/psychological analyses get much denser. *Many other discoveries are given much shorter treatment (less than one page), including Andrew Wile's solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, Dirac's mathematical discovery of spin and anti-matter, Poincaré's discovery of a new class of Fuchsian functions, Royer's recent proof of the Gaussian Correlation Inequality in statistics, and Heisenberg on discovering quantum matrix mechanics. The explorations into artistic and literary creativity are typically much shorter, but are nearly as numerous; they include a painting conceptually representing a string-quartet performance by English artist Graeme Willson, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Robert Schumann's orchestral work Konzertstück, and Picasso's masterpiece Guernica. *At nearly four hundred pages, this is not light reading and takes some patience and time to get through. It is written at a very high level of sophistication, and therefore one is often "bogged down" trying to make complete sense of what one is reading. (However, if one is not writing a review of the book, one need not spend quite so much time disentangling every dense sentence to get the main gist of the passages.) Also difficult are the many references to previous parts of the book. While these references are entirely appropriate, they are quite demanding of the reader given the sheer number of names and amount of material covered. I had to do quite a bit of flipping back and forth, checking the index to remember exactly what so-and-so said that is now being referenced 100 pages later. In other words, this is a thoroughly academic text. *This is a revised edition of the book, which was first published in 2019. The overwhelming positive response, according to the new preface, prompted the author to immediately answer some of the initial reviews and friendly critiques, which I believe made the book quite a bit better (initially there was not nearly as much about poetry; the comparison of poetry with theoretical science now became a separate chapter, enabling McLeish to more logically and thoroughly cover the territory he had staked out). McLeish sadly died very recently (February 2023) at age 60, while holding the newly created chair in Natural Philosophy at University of York. He was a lay preacher in the Anglican Church and a Fellow of the Royal Society. *Reviewed by Peter Walhout, Chemistry Department, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. 60187.

Suzanne Anker

In the wired world of coded connections, zeros and ones exert a daunting pictorial presence. From glamour glossies to public relations wars, from selling sex to the promises of noble sciences, to art as million-dollar kitsch, digital images endlessly spiral, circumnavigating the global sphere. As ‘signs in action’, what compelling narratives do they distinctly embed? Yet in media-driven societies engaged in and dependent on symbolic pictorialisations, how do these representations operate as part of a mutating cultural imaginary? One may consider the concept of the cultural imaginary as an over-arching term sinuously defined as ‘those vast networks interlinking discursive themes, images, motifs and narrative forms that are publicly available within a given culture at any one time, and articulate its psychic and social dimensions’ (Dawson 1994: 48). For cultural historian Graham Dawson ‘cultural imaginaries furnish public forms which both organise knowledge of the social world and give shape to fantasies within the apparently “internal” domain of psychic life’ (Dawson 1994: 48). In addition, these symbol sets can be termed critical fictions and may be located somewhere between illusion, proof and cognitive projection. Constituting a semblance of a ‘collective data-base’, the cultural imaginary traverses contested territories associated with either verifiable axioms or fanciful story telling. These visualising models, employed by artists, scientists, designers, corporate advertisers, journalists and/or politicians, clarify, mislead, aggrandise, stimulate or document. In short, they are representations embedded in social structures, policy decisions and commercial ventures. As aesthetic devices they perform their semiotic function of activating thought and emotion through their powers of communication and circumscribed belief (Anker 2004). Visual representations and their attendant sign systems, however, are not necessarily self-evident and in some cases seeing is, in fact, not believing. Hoaxes, illusions, sleights of hand, all part of image manipulation, are constituent elements of visuality’s deceptive regime. In other circumstances, visual interpretation is compounded by complex degrees of connoisseurship associated with astute visual understanding, explicitly due to an image’s power to evoke audience response. Furthermore, the study of these symbolic entities requires an analysis and contextualisation historically anchored in the cultural imagination. Pictorial devices, composed of formal aesthetic elements such as line, colour, light, space, scale and texture are functionally ‘performative’ ingredients in picture-narration. In the interactive media arts these elements can be reconfigured in real-time thereby amplifying potential modes of visualisation, illustration and simulation. Each style of representation carries within its aesthetic domain a distinctive yet culturally grounded set of values. Empirically situated in a network of discovery, scientific images and their related research data, are currently being integrated into an aesthetic realm. A basic reading of scientific images in their historical contexts renders it evident that these visual tropes are products of scripted visual communication systems and networks of fluctuating and competing discourses. These visual knowledge-producing vehicles emerge out of an amalgam of semiotic, technological and stylistic variations nuanced by their co-evolving actuality. Highly sophisticated visualisation tools and techniques have become an integral part of the early twenty-first century scientific laboratories and their cultural milieu. State-ofthe-art images are created through the use of Photoshop filters, multidirectional lighting effects, re-calibrated colour contrasting and post-production editing. Perhaps more than any other contemporary technical device, digital images have become a lingua franca of communicating systems, and these extend to digital mammograms and in-utero foetal sonograms. Added to this mix of technological developments around imaging is the connective transport provided via the World Wide Web, through which images traverse silicon networks at astonishing speed, thus affecting our consciousness and ethical bearing. In the early twenty-first century, scientific images, like popular culture icons, are increasingly entering the public realm. This migratory manifestation of the visual has, for scholar W.J.T. Mitchell, created a ‘social field’ of images, which underscores the ‘pictorial turn across disciplines’ (Mitchell 2005: 76-89). As artists engage with scientific iconography within their aesthetic practices, scientists employ visual images to illustrate material processes and to improve evidential comprehension. While visual art’s expressive modes often rely on historically deterministic visual connections, picturing in scientific practice is more explicitly causal or mechanistically bounded. In short, coded images, in full-colour regalia, have become part of new media installations, art and fashion magazines, Hollywood films and special effects, as well as extensively servicing the corporate culture of contemporary science and the laboratory sciences themselves. Developments in ‘picture science’ are also attracting scholars to cross-disciplinary intersections. For example, the interdisciplinary research group investigating The World as Image at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities studies ‘visual representations of world concepts and the analysis of scientific representations and models’ (see www/bbaw.de). Images, within this context are looked at as vehicles of historically produced world views encompassing variegated disciplines such as: art history, social history, astronomy, cartography, philosophy, et al. The scholars in this group examine the limitations and functions of visual artefacts in terms of what they both express and deny about a given culture. For example, in the seventeenth century, a revision of the number of continents required that a world map be reconfigured to account for the European ‘discovery’ of additional land mass. This change in the number of landmasses had deep religious consequences since it posed the necessity for a reinterpretation of the relationship of ‘kings’ to ‘continents’. What this kind of research tells us is that, within symbolic world making, there are contingent psychological, philosophical and even cosmological assumptions requiring articulation.1