The best art not only entertains but brings our experience to new and unexpected places. This is typically done with fictional elements divorced from reality, perhaps because we experience so much of reality in everyday life. And yet science has revealed that most of reality is hidden from us. This opens up the possibility that art can expand our minds and fill us with a sense of wonder while staying firmly in reality.
Perhaps this is part of what physicist Richard Feynman was thinking when he wrote:
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
Feynman further illustrates this point:
We have been led [by science] to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck – half of us upside down – by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.
Why take a scientist’s word for it? A fictional palm reader in the romantic drama film Before Sunrise created wonder and inspiration by simply stating a hidden truth beneath all we see:
You're both stars.
Don't forget.
When the stars exploded billions of years ago...
...they formed everything that is this world.
Everything we know is stardust.
So don't forget, you are stardust.
Empirical truth as value added
I generally distrust palm readers, psychics, and others who claim knowledge obtained without a clear foothold in reality. And yet I love the sense of wonder and inspiration these individuals can create. And so I love art that uses fiction. The difference is that art does not pretend to be revealing empirical truth when it is not.
The truth-telling palm reader is an interesting case, since the impact of her words on me was strongly enhanced by my already knowing that what she said is true.
I think this means that empirical truth – especially non-obvious truths that are expressed in meaningful new ways – can be value added in art. In the case of the truth-telling palm reader the fact that we are all stardust is empirically true, since all atoms are created by the process of fusion in the center of stars. Further, linking ourselves to stardust makes this fact more personally meaningful while simultaneously expanding our perspective.
Just for fun, here are some other facts I’ve found that have this quality of being empirically true while being personally meaningful when a unique perspective is taken:
You are connected, through your mother, to billions of years of living beings through your mitochondria – the life-giving organelles powering each of your cells.
All that we think, feel, and know exists as electrochemical symphonies playing out within a 2.8 pound (1.3 kg) chunk of matter in our heads.
When we look at the stars we are looking far into the past (typically millions of years) – time traveling with a glance.
In a real sense the eyes are “windows to the soul” – our pupils react not just to light but how we’re feeling and how much effort we’re putting into our thinking.
Many of our favorite fruits – such as mangos and avocados – link us directly with ghosts of evolution, as these fruits only exist because of giant prehistoric creatures (e.g., giant ground sloths and gomphotheres) that were able to ingest their massive seeds and spread them.
Empirical truth in art is a wonderful yet dangerous game
Why does combining truth and wonder seem so new and rebellious (to me at least)? I think it’s because it can potentially lead to bias. If we become too attached to an idea by celebrating it, we may become biased against dropping it if it turns out to be false.
I think this suggests it is essential to keep ideas at arm’s length until they are firmly established. Yet it’s possible to appreciate the beauty of an idea while accepting it may not be true in the end.
To illustrate this point, consider the following recently revealed fact (Fultz et al., 2019) that I find enchanting:
The brain literally gets washed clean when we sleep: Slow wave sleep creates neural rhythms so large that the brain pulsates, washing it in cerebrospinal fluid and removing toxins.
I think this is beautiful and personal and helps explain the deep mystery of why sleep is treated by our biology like it’s as important as eating and breathing. And yet, unlike the facts I listed above, this new finding has a non-negligible chance of turning out to be false. The reason relates to my previous post about what it takes to firmly establish findings, namely the need for solid replication and agreement across methods.
Without keeping these exciting new ideas at arm’s length we may end up as rigid thinkers, perhaps not unlike those who persecuted Galileo for questioning that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Instead, we could perhaps use our elation at these new findings to drive us to conclusively test these ideas for the kind of firmness that would warrant building them into our worldview with full emotional attachment.
Tension between fantasy and reality in art
Despite my joy when art celebrates the deep truths of our reality, tying ourselves to truth would no doubt stifle creativity and, ultimately, miss the point of art.
Still, there are some remarkable examples of art that makes science appreciation its goal. The Cosmos TV series is a great example (the original is from the 1980s but there have been recent reboots in 2014 and 2020). As Richard Feynman envisioned, Cosmos uses narrative, acting, and visual illustration to tell grand stories about the reality science has revealed. (I highly recommend watching the reboot series if you haven’t already.)
Another notable example – effectively illustrating the tension between fantasy and reality given the name – is the children’s TV series The Magic School Bus. I have become familiar with it because my two small children love it. Like all TV shows, the first objective of the series is to entertain, and so there is engaging narrative, visual effects (it’s animated) and, of course, magic. Embedded within the plot, however, are lessons about the hidden reality that science has revealed. Indeed, the need for magic in the narrative comes from this reality being largely hidden from us – the bus makes the characters microscopic (for example) for many of the plots. Ultimately, the non-scientific plot devices are used in the service of the series’s dual goals of entertainment and science education.
The Hero’s Journey as a path to truths about human nature
Typically, great literature (and perhaps great art generally) reveals truths about human nature, not the reality surrounding humans. I think this reflects our extremely social nature. We seek emotional responses from art as well as learning, and the overlap is typically revelations about human nature.
A great example of this is The Hero’s Journey. Developed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940s, a common narrative structure was identified across a wide variety of stories throughout history. The structure often involves supernatural elements, yet psychological and social truths are revealed as the hero journeys through a variety of challenges and comes out victorious in the end. Since being developed, The Hero’s Journey has been used to write famous narratives, such as the Star Wars movie series.
An intriguing fact about The Hero’s Journey is that Joseph Campbell was heavily influenced by Carl Jung’s psychological theories when developing it. Could this be an example of the reality revealed by science being celebrated in art?
Unfortunately, Carl Jung – as with Sigmund Freud before him – was not a true scientist in the sense of having falsifiable hypotheses that were tested through observation and experimentation. Indeed, Freud’s psychological theories (which Jung’s were based on) are used as the canonical example of non-falsifiable (and therefore non-scientific) hypotheses by Karl Popper. Some aspects of The Hero’s Journey may be contaminated by these non-scientific theories, perhaps spreading beliefs about human nature that do not lead to the development of insight and wisdom like we would hope. Luckily, many aspects of The Hero’s Journey – such as resisting calls to adventure, finding mentors, overcoming challenges, and returning home – appear to be more universal and clearly true of human experience than most of Jung’s theories.
A great example of how an attempt to imbue art with truth can go wrong because of inaccurate scientific beliefs is the movie Forbidden Planet. This science fiction movie – which has strangely amazing visuals and is worth watching, by the way – is more fictional than intended. Rather than the hidden monster discovered by Dr. Morbius being outside his control, it turns out to reflect the dark intentions of his Freudian subconscious. There’s no doubt many neurocognitive processes are subconscious (something known since before Freud), but Freud was wrong to insist on their universally problematic and sexual nature. And so the movie Forbidden Planet is entertaining but does not ring true in the deeper sense that we hope for from great art.
Leonardo da Vinci’s art both enhanced and was enhanced by scientific truths
Leonardo was a polymath, incorporating his scientific observations of human anatomy and optics into his paintings. For example, Mona Lisa’s smile (see below) is informed by Leonardo’s pioneering investigations into the anatomy of the lips, as well as his investigations of optics to inform the careful blurring of the lips to create a specific visual effect. Yet there’s evidence Leonardo spent the last 16 years of his life painting the Mona Lisa, reflecting a desire to realize some melded scientific and artistic ideal rather than reflecting the actual real living Lisa del Giocondo (who the Mona Lisa depicts). True scientific knowledge elevated the art, and vice versa.
Another extremely famous work of art, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man (see the top of this article) was also informed by his own scientific measurements of human anatomy. This drawing was not just a scientific project, however. It revealed the geometric beauty of the human form, merging both artistic and scientific goals. Further, the aesthetic details of the depicted human were entirely unnecessary for the science, such that this is decidedly a work of art despite its scientific utility. Ultimately, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is an example of both art enhanced by scientific truth and the celebration (and demonstration) of scientific truth enhanced by art.
Is art ultimately about entertainment or learning?
The answer, of course, is both. Being a scientist and educator myself, I don’t consider my scientific or educational works to be art. I think having a primary goal of entertainment – broadly construed to include any sort of emotional reaction (typically enjoyable) for its own sake – is necessary for something to be art.
But it seems to me that great art creates highly complex reactions, with additional enhancement from learning some deep truths about empirical reality.
Topics for learning don’t seem to be treated equally in art, however. As I pointed out above, being social animals compels us to prefer learning about human nature through art. Perhaps as the human mind and brain are better understood as science continues to advance there will be more content for artists to build off of. But there is a history of directly appreciating (non-human) nature itself via art, and it seems like we could combine that appreciation with learning originating from other areas of science.
I’m looking forward to finding more cases of artists enhancing their art through incorporation of the deep yet not-widely-known truths discovered by scientists. This would keep fulfilling Feynman’s vision of celebrating the wondrous reality science has revealed, following in the footsteps of da Vinci and other great artists of the past.