Talk About the Passion
Two cultures? That’s old news. At Nautilus, we’ve interviewed scientists and artists who don’t see a rift between their fields; on the contrary, they take inspiration from one another. This intersection has caused us to think that today’s scientists and artists are players in a new cultural Renaissance, or at least a throwback to the old one, when scientists were artists and artists were scientists.
Florentine sculptor, painter, and printmaker Antonio Pollaiuolo, for example, was the first of many Renaissance masters to dissect human bodies to better understand and represent the naked human form. Science was a great inspiration to their art—in a rather macabre way. But both art and science benefited from their forensics. And didn’t Einstein, not a bad violinist himself, say he felt that Mozart’s music “has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed”?
I decided to put the inspiration question directly to five scientists and five artists. I asked the scientists what work of art inspired them, and the artists what in science inspired them. Their answers, in their own words, are personal, idiosyncratic, and driven by deep curiosity, just like science and art themselves.
If I’m really honest, and being unpretentious, the creative force that has most influenced me as a scientist is science fiction. As a very young kid, I watched a fair amount of Star Trek on TV, which was very influential because it triggered the idea that there could be things beyond normal perception, beyond my everyday experience of the world. Star Trek tells an immersive story about living, thinking beings faced with endless puzzles. Of course, there’s always a neat packaged solution at the end of the 45 minutes. Quite often, the resolution in Star Trek comes through an interesting combination of abstract logic and human personality—of different individual ways of seeing. You would have a team of people working together through thick and thin, and that could be exciting, it could be adventurous, and in the end, you could sort of make progress. There was a certain appeal to that when I was a young person with a lot of questions, beginning to realize that science was a direction I was interested in pursuing.
One of the things Star Trek did so well was that there was actual science behind its imaginings. There’s a famous episode with a creature that’s silicon-based instead of carbon-based. It looks like some hideous carpet from the 1970s. In the show, it takes the characters quite a time to recognize that this is a living, thinking thing because it is so alien. It got across this sense of, stuff doesn’t necessarily have to be built exactly like us, not just in terms of how it looks, but its fundamentals. It was an actual scientific question at the time: Could you build life differently? Now we know that silicon-based life is somewhat unlikely, but the question of whether alternate forms of life could exist remains.
I love the idea of the artist as antibody, neutralizing the toxins in our culture.
Science fiction helped me to grasp how extraordinary the cosmos really is, and to wonder at the connection between all of that and the very parochial experience of being an organism on the Earth. I wanted to know how thoseout there somewhere? So my trajectory began with physics and cosmology, but over time sort of veered toward astrobiology, which is the quest to understand the nature of life in the universe, to understand what is out there that might support and initiate life. This may entail going off in a spaceship to explore, or exploring other worlds through our telescopes even though we can’t physically be there ourselves.
