Above, Einstein plays the violin.This article was originally published in the Education Guardian.
Why are we still having the old arts vs science debate?
Which branch of learning, in the last century, has delivered the ultimate recipe for adventure; has expanded our intellectual horizons, quickened our understanding of the world around us, and opened our eyes to the astounding possibilities of the past and the future? Piece of cake: the answer is mathematical physics.
A century ago, the Milky Way was all there was. It took a great intellect with a great telescope to take a closer look at a smudgy object called Andromeda and realise - and what a thrill that moment must have been - that Andromeda was not a star, or a nebula, at all. It was another galaxy, another entire cluster of stars, more than two million light years away.
In the course of the next few decades, Edwin Hubble and later astronomers discovered that Andromeda was only one of millions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars.
In the course of the following few decades, mathematical physicists morphed into experimental and theoretical physicists, geophysicists and astrophysicists; they started with the very small and confirmed that the universe was indeed made of atoms - the idea might be ancient, but the confirmation is hardly older than Einstein - and then they looked at the whole cosmos and realised that they didn't know the half of it: 96% of all the universe seemed to be made of some unknown stuff, and all the stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, continents, countries, parish councillors and coin-operated vending machines in 100 billion galaxies across 13 billion light years of space added up to a trifling 4% of all there is.
Who made this epic achievement possible, and who is now providing the instruments that illuminate the history of creation back to the first unimaginably small flicker of a second, such as the space probes that will make the journey to the distant stars and scan the void to understand why, in an apparently lifeless cosmos, the universe seems to have been fashioned so that life might be possible? The answer is another piece of cake: engineering graduates, can-do people who understand rigour and precision and stress and the limits of load-bearing structures, but whose achievements right now are opening new worlds of understanding and delight.
None of these discoveries has direct practical value. Science is part of human culture, like literature, like painting, like history. It is above everything an intellectual delight. You could call cosmology the ultimate leisure activity: it does not win bread to feed a single mouth. You could call spacecraft design a dreary, painstaking trial-and-error labour that certainly helps beam live coverage of international sporting fixtures to a billion homes (and what a preposterous fantasy that would have seemed 50 years ago), but adds nothing to the economy when it comes to sending a little planetary automaton to land on Saturn's moon Titan. You could say that and be right, but you'd also be wrong: the Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan in 2005 was an adventure as luminous as any novel, painting or science fiction movie.
I started with mathematical physics and engineering, but I could as easily have composed a hymn to physical chemistry, or biology, or palaeontology - sciences which in the same short timespan have told us the most astonishing things about ourselves, our history, our kinship with creation and our intimate relationship with the substance of the planet we share. And this hymn would have nothing to do with money-making, or idle leisure activities; it would have to do with the ultimate wealth, the only riches really worth having: the stuff in our minds.
I cannot think why we are still having the old arts v science debate, on this website and elsewhere in the media. The nine muses of the ancient Greeks stood for intellectual adventure and inquiry: an attempt to impose order and fashion meaning from the flux of events, substances, actions and reactions around us. There are lessons in history (there are always lessons in history: the trick is to work out which is the right lesson for now) and in literature, in music, in architecture, in the plastic arts.
The literary achievements of the last 3,000 years - from Homer, the Pentateuch, Ovid and Dante to Dickens, HG Wells, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann - have provided a seam of human understanding, the riches of which are probably inexhaustible. But you could say exactly the same thing about the research of Newton, Humphry Davy, Faraday, Darwin, Einstein and the latest generation of mathematical physicists, engineers and biologists who have provided the parallel great adventure. I find the kind of arguments running right now - about what kind of student British universities ought to be producing - absolutely bizarre.
An engineer with mathematics and business skills? What use would such a person be unless he could also argue his case elegantly and persuasively in the language of Shakespeare and Dickens and JBS Haldane (science, peculiarly, is conducted almost everywhere in English)? And what would be the point of learning 17th- or 18th-century literature, or Victorian history, without also marvelling at the science that informed Newton and his Enlightenment inheritors, or Darwin and the hectic world of exploration around him?
More than 50 years ago, CP Snow, novelist, boffin and man about the corridors of power, put the "two cultures" question, as if science was somehow qualitatively different from the arts. But we cannot live without literature and art: it is through these that unique minds that lived a thousand years ago and ten thousand miles away speak directly and separately to each one of us, here and now. We cannot live without science, not because it gives us MP3 players and MMR vaccines, but because it tells us something concrete and reliable about the physical world around us. The poet shares his world with me. The scientist lights up our world for all of us. If we really only had one way of understanding the world, what kind of understanding would that be?
So we are back to the great British intellectual airport dilemma: which bit of cultural baggage should you carry into the cabin for your flight through life, and which should remain sealed in the hold? Here is the answer: it is a bogus question. There is no check-in clerk. There are no intellectual baggage limits. The destination is unknown. The flight duration is uncertain. The take-off is right now. You should take both, because you will need them on the journey, and there is no carousel at the other end.
by Tim Radford, 11 April 2008
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