By Laura

In the essay, Art that Transfigures Science, Alan Lightman discusses ways science can influence, shape and enhance art. Scientific concepts, the “creative tensions between reason and intuition” and the way scientists think, when combined with artistic endeavors can create a powerful medium with which to discuss, contemplate and understand our world. Lightman's book Einstein's Dreams, is a book about just this.

Lightman points out the difference between how artists and scientists think. For example, “Scientists struggle mightily to name things…it gives scientists a comfort, a sense of power, a feeling of control”. Artists however, “tend to avoid naming things…to name a thing too precisely can destroy that delicate, participatory creative experience”. Lightman blends the named, formulaic physics concepts, theories of special relativity that involve concrete problems and answers with the artistic viewpoint, by creating a book filled with ambiguity and imprecision. The physics concepts, if one is familiar with them, come through powerfully in the book; however Lightman pushes the concepts further, by creating a medium to think about questions without answers. We can quantify just how much time is dilated at fast speeds, but we can not know what it would be like to experience that reality. Lightman asks; what would the world be like if we operated under different concepts of time?

He uses Einstein’s own method of looking at and thinking about physics and special relativity in general in the creation of the book. By using the mind of a scientist as the format for the book he enriches the narratives’ artistic power, “What science can offer art is that most subtle quality of all, the way that scientists think, the way they live in the world, or what one might call the mid of science”. There is a blend of the scientific mind, Einstein, with an artistic effect. Einstein chose simple thought experiments in order to think about physics. These vignettes are like the thought experiments Einstein’s work was built upon, however in the book they become not specifically relevant to current problems in physics, but more general, a way of looking at our assumptions and prejudices about time.

If we take the following excerpt from Einstein’s Dreams, we can see the fundamental blending that Lightman wishes to achieve, “When the science is integrated so that it is part of the human drama, part of the beauty and mystery of human existence, then science and art have achieved a perfect harmony”.

Indeed, each man and each woman desires a bird. Because this flock of nightingales is time. Time flutters and fidgets and hops with these birds. Trap one of these nightingales beneath a bell jar and time stops…On those occasions when a nightingale is caught, the catchers delight in the moment now frozen. They savor…the trapped happiness over a prize or a birth or romance, the captured smell of cinnamon or white double violets…but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear, flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life (Lightman, Einstein’s, 174-176)

We may know that as the speed of, say a moving clock, becomes infinitesimally close to the speed of light, as measured by a reference frame on earth, it runs increasingly slower than a clock measured on earth. This is a fascinating concept, but it is difficult to understand in any way other than cerebrally. Lightman takes this idea and inverts, plays with it and expands on it throughout the book. What if time was a bird and we could catch it? Lightman formulates intriguing unanswerable questions and recognizes, “it is not easy to portray science in art and also to maintain the integrity of the art…what the novel…has to offer is a journey…a search for meaning in our baffling world. We may eventually get to the brain, but we go first to the stomach, or the heart”. The passage certainly creates an emotional response before it creates a cerebral one.

The book poses questions that do not have definite answers, by using aspects from the concepts of physics that do have concrete answers and have been extensively contemplated by physicists. According to Merriam Webster, to transfigure means to give a new and typically exalted or spiritual appearance: outwardly and usually for the better. The fascinating physics of Einstein and special relativity is skillfully and seamlessly united with the “art” of the novel in Einstein’s dreams; we have science transfigured into art.

Works Cited:

Lightman, Alan. Art that Transfigures Science. New York Times: New York. 2003

Lightman, Alan. Einstein’s Dreams. Warner Books: New York. 1993

Merriam-Webster Online.