Chance and Obsession. On the occasion of Universe, by Ricardo Brey at the S.M.A.K in Gent.
text: Christian Maes
 
 
 
In front of a 1000 images, pieces of art, I feel the passion of the artist. A man who makes
a 1000 drawings must be obsessed. He must have suffered, and still afterwards, having
the feeling that yet it has not been completed. Art is a passion, they say. As is science,
driven by feelings of truth, of beauty perhaps and by the passion to make sense.
 
I have been asked here to speak as a professional physicist. Hence, my goal is not so
much to communicate my personal impressions, but rather to shed some light on what is
before us from the point of view of physics. I trust that artists and scientists understand
each other, especially in front of a wide open universe.
The work of Ricardo Brey at first brings up two associations. My thoughts move between
two memories.
The first one is to the old idea of the homo universalis. The man who deals with the
whole universe, as one and at once (or at least in six months). I am reminded of the color
and of the fine lines in the drawing works of Leonardo da Vinci. It rests between
illustration, creation and discovery. Understanding and explaining by picturing it; the
images that give details, yet point to some connections, perhaps something bigger.
The second association is to the 19th century naturalists, these collectors and analysts of
natural art. Collecting to measure, to make huge catalogues, to compare and to classify.
It is the art of taxonomy, proposing a management of knowledge. I am reminded of the
voyage that the young Charles Darwin made aboard the H.M.S. Beagle - the most
important event in his life, so he wrote somewhere, and perhaps the single most important
addition to the description of the condition humaine. At that time, on board, a lot of
drawings were made. They were artistic and depicting the natural reality. The pictures
and images that have come to us, sometimes reveal a strange world and we hesitate
whether the imaged world and nature is just old, very old perhaps or merely exotic and
unknown. We have come to trust the images, even though they are often strange, broken,
spoiled and implausible. They look like experiments of nature. Trying out some species,
as it were. As postcards, with love from nature...could be their subtitle. Details are
caressing the world; there is time and space to reflect upon that universe; without that
love, only some sort of bitterness would remain.
Perhaps you know that one of the books of Alexander von Humboldt A Personal
Narrative inspired the young Charles Darwin. Humboldt was also a naturalist and
explorer of much of Central and South America - he visited Cuba in 1800. His drawings
are sending us pictures of rivers, birds, fishes, ruins, and of everything that seemed to
matter to science. That same Humboldt is present in various ways in the Universe of
Ricardo Brey. The last work of Humboldt is called Kosmos, which perhaps was an
attempt to unify all of science. When Humboldt died, the Kosmos was still unfinished...
On the moon there is the Mare Humboldtianum, also to be found on one of the images of
the Universe.
The combination of drawing, of artistic illustration with scientific illustration is of course
very old. Another famous example comes from the pioneering days of modern
chemistry. Antoine Lavoisier, father of modern chemistry, was married to Marie-Anne
Pierrette Paulze. She was instrumental in many ways but in particular, being well
educated and a talented artist herself, she illustrated his scientific texts with baffling
competence. The picture of the couple, in the Metropolitan museum and painted by
Jacques Louis David (1788), appears to say that the marriage was a happy one. It appears
to me that the creation of the book Universe of Ricardo Brey has needed the scanning
hand of a devoted Isabel.
Beyond these two associations which mostly belong to the history of science, there is of
course the subject itself, the universality of the universe. There is no very abstract
statement here in the works of Ricardo Brey. Rather the opposite, and perhaps there is
even a critique of abstraction. The Universe is about stones, fishes, insects,...The
universe comes to us via our senses. Reality and subject are in relation, but the world
outside exists even before it is sensed or tangible.
Ricardo Brey creates a world, a mythology of images and creatures that could make a
world or a universe. Why not this universe?
What is the universe? There are ways of understanding that question. The first one is in
a more restricted sense: what do our best theories say about that jewel, the cosmos. That
is the subject of physical cosmology. A second meaning asks for a world view, a natural
philosophy so to speak, that goes beyond myths and story-telling.
Let me immediately add that we have understood in the last hundred years that we
understand the world much less than we ever thought we did. Of all matter or energy,
only about 5 percent we have been able to study. You have probably heard about the
puzzles of dark matter and of dark energy. We do not longer know what is time (if we
ever did believe the answer to this old question of Augustine, quid est tempus?), nor do
we know what is space, and we even doubt nowadays whether we recognize an
explanation when we see one. Please do not misunderstand these words. They do not
want to take you away from a scientific world view or for not caring about scientific
analphabetism. Compare it with learning to love a person; you never knew there was so
much you did not know. There is progress in science but sure enough, we do not know
everything - very far from it.
Let me turn to the standard model of physical cosmology. There are a number of
findings there that have grown from the last 100 years of thinking about the cosmos and
of observing the sky. That enterprise has something in common with exhibitions: you
can look but you cannot touch. You cannot feel, or change, or even reproduce.
Then what are the elements in our understanding of the universe today? The corner stone
is the general theory of relativity which has given a new and spectacular interpretation of
Kepler’s words ubi materia, ibi geometria. Our universe has started in a hot and dense
phase and has expanded since ``these days”. The dynamics can be understood in a
collection of equations, due to Albert Einstein (1917). That is probably the most
important insight of the cosmology of the 20th century: that the universe is dynamic, not
static. The universe is homogeneous and isotropic and there is no preferred position.
The Universe of Ricardo Brey has no center, no preferred direction and time is present in
the evolution of images. We as humans have no special position. We understand some
many details, the making of matter, how all is star dust, and what makes the world go
around. The times, the distances and the transformations of energy in the cosmos are
sometimes so unimaginably big. In that perspective is mankind a rather recent
phenomenon. The universe is about 13 -15 billion years; the solar system is about 4.5
billion years and man walks the earth since a couple of million years. Our intuitions and
our first thoughts are sometimes too narrow, too blindfolded and we sometimes even ask
the wrong questions. It is not always what we think it is. Art also has some of these
features. Yet, our fascination for the universe remains. It is like a form of melancholy, to
our earliest existence, as star material or energy. And we wonder, what is the law, the
unique word that summarizes all of it.
About the second way of answering ``what is the universe”, what is a compatible world
view? I have very little to say. The point of view of today’s scientist is methodologically
unchanged over the past many centuries. We have still the same ambition as the ancient
Greeks, we seek the universal understanding of the Hellenists, the courage of the
renaissance and we appreciate the beauty of the romantics. The age of Enlightenment has
liberated free and scientific thinking and the Encyclopedists, I am reminded, wanted to
make a 1000 pages of universe. The grammar of science is one and is in fact only a
minor sophistication of our daily routines. As Descartes writes in his Discours de la
methode: ``Le bon sens est la chose la mieux partagée...(...) mais... ce n’est pas assez
d’avoir l’esprit bon, mais le principal est de l’appliquer bien.” That is what we try in the
natural sciences: to use well our intellectual capabilities to tackle sometimes enormously
complex questions of nature.
In that enterprise we want to unite and to connect. It is sometimes called the reductionist
programme, but that name carries a bad connotation - as if knowing mechanisms and
connections would reduce the beauty and the joy of nature. And indeed, some type of
scientific world view now and then seems to emerge. It comes in two movements, a
passive and an active one.
By passive, I mean the understanding that some way of looking at reality is no longer
very useful. We do not pray for the return of the sun while experiencing a solar eclipse,
we do not feel that the heavenly waters would surrender to our dances or cries. It is
liberating us from unwanted fears and asks us not to surrender to superstition, a
superstition that has always been the mighty weapon of the ruling class. It does not mean
that we could not study or even cherish ancient rituals or not so ancient traditions in our
cultures and in our homes. We are however less bound and more equal. It is not an
accident that the age of Enlightenment, the age of Reason, not only boosted scientific
thinking, but also came with declarations of human rights and with the emancipation of
social classes. All movements, ideologies or religions will be tested on their record of
liberation and emancipation.
The second movement is the active building of new ways of coping. People seem to need
it. James Maxwell, one of the greatest physicists of all times, warns us: ``The rate of
change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical
interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help
to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.”
If there is one Credo of the scientist, a programmatic soul, then it is the belief in an
external world, in an objective reality whose existence does not depend on our ways of
looking at it.
Whether there is to be found some consolation in the reflection about nature has been
heavily disputed. Spinoza, of all philosophers perhaps the closest to the modern
scientific tradition, would recommend it to all of us. Yet, there are no moral lessons to
be taken from nature, but the study of nature will hopefully guide us in understanding
life. There is no direction, indeed no sense, to be expected from nature but, as Prof.
Nummedal adds (in Nooit meer slapen, W.F. Hermans): ``Wetenschap is de titanische
poging van het menselijk intellect zich uit zijn kosmische isolement te verlossen door te
begrijpen! It is again about liberation, science then as a humanism, not because it is
about man but because it transcends him, not because it is anthropocentric, but because
all humans are equal in front of the universe.
I conclude with a final thought. I have mentioned the obsession of the artist, the drive
and the melancholy of the artist and of the scientist. Yet, the result is not purely
mechanical.
The making of the drawings and of the images has something arbitrary. There is an
element of chance and of free association. One would sometimes think that not only our
life and works, but also the whole universe and the so called natural laws are (also)
subject to chance laws. Moral certainties much more than absoluteness. It is the
certainty of the jazz player and his improvisations, the dice in his pocket. That is not the
last word however. We understand today much better how arbitrariness and pure luck or
chance can follow rigorously from deterministic law. Chaos, the seemingly erratic
movement of particles, the very sensitive dependence on initial conditions and on
boundary conditions, makes prediction very difficult, but the dynamics remains
deterministic. Again, all is not what it seems to be.
However, free association has also a relation with courage and with fantasy. Wherever
you go these days, you see how the natural sciences have been chased out of the centre of
what was once their historic surroundings, out of the historical buildings, and how
faculties of science must reside in soulless concrete blocks, far away from childÕs play.
People are interested in popular science, yet refuse to study science, being afraid perhaps
of facing more universal truths. How visible are the sciences? How reliable or how
relevant can be a movement, a spirituality, or a cultural study and tradition without the
sciences? Still, the most important drive in science is the passion for going on discovery
of truth. For that we need fantasy and courage, to try new, to dare new, to do new. Who
else than the artist or what else than the artistic feeling will give us that?
 
Christian Maes
Instituut voor Theoretische Fysica
K.U.Leuven
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