Banville on Science as Metaphor

[Richard Romeo]

Here it is, a.

John Banville has worked in journalism since 1969, and served as literary 
editor of The Irish Times since 1988. His numerous literary works, touching 
on both artistic and scientific subjects, have won him many prizes 
internationally. His latest novel is The Untouchable (Knopf, 1997).


I wish to advance a thesis which, were they to take note of it, the 
academies would decry as scandalous. My thesis is that modern science, 
particularly physics, is being forced, under pressure of its own advances, 
to acknowledge that the truths it offers are true not in an absolute but in 
a poetic sense, that its laws are contingent, that its facts are a kind of 
metaphor. Of course, art and science are fundamentally different in their 
methods, and in their ends. The doing of science involves a level of rigor 
unattainable to art. A scientific hypothesis can be proven--or, perhaps more 
importantly, disproven--but a poem, a picture, or a piece of music, cannot. 
Yet in their origins art and science are remarkably similar. It was a 
scientist, Niels Bohr, who declared that a great truth is a statement whose 
opposite is also a great truth. Oscar Wilde would have agreed.

Since the Enlightenment, the chasm between art and science has yawned ever 
wider with each new stage in the campaign to subdue nature to man's will. 
The human race cannot abide nature's indifference, and uses the physical 
sciences to attempt to wring from it a word of acknowledgment. Yet what we 
today think of as science is for the most part not science at all, but 
applied science, that is, technology. The machinery of modern science is so 
elaborate, and the building of it requires so much ingenuity--requires, 
indeed, so much science--that we naturally confuse the thinking with the 
doing. The great particle accelerator at CERN, for example, is for us the 
very image of modern science: a vast and inconceivably expensive machine 
built to perform minute and unimaginably complex operations whose results 
can be interpreted only by a handful of physicists. But we are willing to 
pay the cost of building these machines, are willing to allow the physicists 
their arcane rules and specialized language, because we believe that they 
are getting their hands into the very bowels, or, rather, the very synapses, 
of nature. And at some point, we believe, they will bring forth news of 
another advance, another boiled-down version of the world's variousness, 
another E = mc2, only bigger and better. Perhaps this time they may even 
discover the final equation, the Grand Theory of Everything. Then, as 
Stephen Hawking puts it, "we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just 
ordinary people [I am struck by that distinction, by the way], be able to 
take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the 
universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate 
triumph of human reason--for then we would know the mind of God."

Such foolhardy talk, from such an eminent source, misleads us into the 
notion that the aim of science is to find the "meaning" of the world. That 
there must be a meaning seems certain, otherwise how is it that there is 
such a thing as progress? Science keeps uncovering more and more secrets, 
keeps getting closer and closer to...well, to something, in the same way 
that computations in the infinitesimal calculus keep approaching nearer and 
nearer to infinity without ever getting there. Progress must be progress 
toward something, surely, some final end to the quest for knowledge? But to 
my mind the world has no meaning. It simply is. Leibnitz's thrilling 
question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is significant not 
because an answer to it is possible, but because out of the blind, boiling 
chaos that is the world, a species should have emerged that is capable of 
posing such a question.

Science and art are different ways of looking at the same thing, namely, the 
world. Let us take the case of Goethe. In his role as amateur scientist, he 
was vehemently opposed to Newton's mechanistic model of reality. He was 
mistaken--that is to say, his science was bad science, although his 
scientific writings are not bad philosophy, and still less are they bad 
poetry. Goethe demanded that science should always hold to the human scale. 
He opposed the use of the microscope, since he believed that what cannot be 
seen with the naked eye should not be seen, and that what is hidden from us 
is hidden for a purpose. In this, Goethe was a scandal among scientists, 
whose first, firm, and necessary principle is that if something can be done, 
then it should be done. Yet his furious denial of Newton was more than 
merely the bloodshot jealousy of one great mind drawing a bead on another. 
Goethe's theory of light is wrong insofar as the science of optics is 
concerned, yet in the expression of his theory Goethe achieves a pitch of 
poetic intensity that is as persuasive, in its way, as anything Newton did. 
But persuasive at what level?

There is a world beyond politics, says the poet Wallace Stevens, and we 
might adapt that to say that there is a world beyond science, or, at least, 
there is a world beyond the current state of science. At the end of the 19th 
century professors of physics in the great European universities were 
steering students away from the discipline because they believed that there 
was very little of interest left to be discovered about the nature of 
physical reality. Then came Einstein. As we approach the end of the 20th 
century, we are still guilty of hubris, as evidenced by Stephen Hawking's 
statements quoted above. Probably a Unified Field Theory will be achieved, 
and will seem for a time, perhaps even as long as the period between 
Newton's Principia and Einstein's first paper on the theory of relativity, 
to explain everything; then a Heisenberg or a Gödel will come forward and 
point to a loose end which, when pulled, will unravel the entire structure.

This is a truth that both clearsighted artists and scientists--that is, 
those not blinded by hubris, or a cramped imagination, or both--have always 
acknowledged: There is no end to the venture. The difference between the 
two, however, is that while the artist acknowledges that in art there is 
nothing new to be said, only new ways of saying the old things, new 
combinations of old materials--a process, paradoxically, that makes a new 
thing, namely, the work of art--science seems always to be pressing on into 
hitherto uncharted territory. Yet the fact is, science is not making this 
new landscape, but discovering it. Einstein remarked more than once how 
strange it is that reality, as we know it, keeps proving itself amenable to 
the rules of man-made science. It certainly is strange; indeed, so strange, 
that perhaps it should make us a little suspicious. More than one 
philosopher has conjectured that our thought extends only as far as our 
capacity to express it. So too it is possible that what we consider reality 
is only that stratum of the world that we have the faculties to comprehend. 
For instance, I am convinced that quantum theory flouts commonsense logic 
only because commonsense logic has not yet been sufficiently expanded.

I am not arguing that art is greater than science, more universal in its 
concerns, and wiser in its sad recognition of the limits of human knowledge. 
What I am proposing is that despite the profound differences between them, 
at an essential level art and science are so nearly alike as to be 
indistinguishable. The only meaningful distinction I can see between the two 
is that science has a practical extension into technology, and art does not. 
But this is a distinction only in terms of utility. At the level that 
concerns me, the level of metaphor, art and science are both blithely 
inutile--at this level, for instance, the theory of relativity has nothing 
to do with the atomic bomb.

The critic Frank Kermode has argued, persuasively, I believe, that one of 
art's greatest attractions is that it offers "the sense of an ending." The 
sense of completeness that is projected by the work of art 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 
Johannes Kepler recognized that the planets move in elliptical orbits and 
not in perfect circles, as received wisdom had for millennia held they must 
do, he added infinitely to the richness of man's life and thought. 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. When, probably early in the next millennium, quantum theory 
gives up its secrets, we shall see the world again with a new, ignorant 
eye--not as a blizzard of atoms, not as a speck whirling in an unimaginable 
immensity of darkness, not even as that blue-and-white marble photographed 
by the first moon travelers, the beauty of which took our breath away--as 
our ordinary and always known home, which is the world that art and science 
alike, even in their most seemingly transcendental modes, are concerned 
with. In the 1970s, when quantum theory began employing such terms as 
"beauty," "charm," and "strangeness" to signify the various properties of 
quarks, a friend turned to me and said: "You know, they're waiting for you 
to give them the words." I saw what he meant, but he was not quite right: 
Science does not need art to supply its metaphors. Art and science are alike 
in their quest to reveal the world. Rainer Maria Rilke spoke for both the 
artist and the scientist when he said:

Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, 
Fruit tree, Window,--possibly: Pillar, Tower?...but for saying, remember, 
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The author is at The Irish Times, Post Office Box 74, 10-16 D'Olier Street, 
Dublin 2, Ireland.


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>From: allied at sas.upenn.edu (Allie M D'Augustine)
>To: richardromeo at hotmail.com (Richard Romeo)
>Subject: Re: Banville on Science as Metaphor
>Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 11:33:32 -0400 (EDT)
>
>Richard Romeo wrote:
> > this article.  Many interesting points. I can post the whole thing if 
>folks
> > want to read it
>
>Could you do that?  I'd like to read it.
>
>Thanks!
>Allie


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