Science as Metaphor: The Poetic Nature of Modern Physics, Papers of Mathematics

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• Taken from the journal Leonardo , Volume 7, 1974, pp 255-

is to be found nowhere else in our lives. We cannot remember our birth, and we shall not know our death; in between is the ramshackle circus of our days and doings. But in a poem, a picture, or a sonata, the curve is completed. This is the triumph of form. It is a deception, but one that we desire, and require. The trick that art performs is to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and back again in the twinkling of a metaphor. Here is Wallace Stevens again, in lines from his poem Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942): You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.* This is the project that all artists are embarked upon: to subject mundane reality to such intense, passionate, and unblinking scrutiny that it becomes transformed into something rich and strange while yet remaining solidly, stolidly, itself. Is the project of pure science any different? …When Copernicus posited the horrifying notion that not the Earth but the sun is the center of our world, he literally put man in his place, and he did it for the sake of neither good nor ill, but for the sake of demonstrating how things are. A commentary by Ryuji Takaki, Kobe Design University Science is an activity to observe objects and phenomena in the nature and to construct consepts and natural laws. Art is an activity to make objects and performances based on the concepts and laws. Therefore, the essential difference of scirnce and art lies in the "relation between objects and concests". Other properties, such as importance of creative mind, necessity of publication, etc, are common in both activities. For example, The Ohm's law is established by observing phenomena in electric circuits (this is science). On the other hand, from the scientific results one makes up electric equipments (this is technology). Furthermore, one makes art works incluiding electric parts. In this sense the technology and art are similar to each other. Both activities are aimed at creating valuable things, materially valuable in technology and mentally valuable in art. In contrast, the science is originally aimed at increasing knowledges, and not valuable things. The relation between science and art is shown schematically below. Objects science Concepts

Art, Technology A commentary by Ernesto Sabato, from “ Latin America: a different way forward?” The basic difference between science and art lies in the fact that scientists strip away the self from their view of the world, while artists do not aspire to such abstraction. The originality of art lies precisely in this apparent incapacity, which explains why art has style while science does not: it would be meaningless to look for the "style" of Pythagoras in his celebrated theorem. The language of science is ultimately no more than a sequence of abstract and impersonal symbols, while a work of art is a unique and original mark left on the world, the concrete expression, enigmatic and uncertain, of a creature of flesh and blood.

A commentary by Alexander McBirney on the book “Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc” by Arthur I. Miller In trying to contrive a parallel between the contributions of Einstein and Picasso, Miller overlooks a fundamental difference between science and art. Science is progressive; art is cumulative. Each new scientific contribution builds on what has gone before, replacing old ideas with new ones. An innovative work of art does not make earlier work outdated. It simply adds to a gallery that includes centuries of work by artists in countless different cultures. Thus when Picasso rejected the rules of perspective and painted a nude woman as a geometrical figure with eyes in the back of its head he was not discovering new principles that made all that had gone before obsolete. He was simply introducing yet another mode of artistic expression.