Science, Art and Understanding

In Albert Einstein's 1918 speech Principles of Research¹

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Why would we appreciate a landscape painting in a world where a photograph more accurately captures a pixel-perfect map of the colour emanating from every point in the scene? The photograph faithfully captures and conveys the exact perspective of the photographer. The precise properties of the light that reach the observer — the intensity of the light and its frequency — that, when interpreted by our eyes, create our experience of the field.

Both paintings and photographs are the projection of an experience onto a two-dimensional image. But in paintings, we appreciate the way that the experience is filtered through the interpretation of the painter, capturing a different visceral aspect of the experience.

It could be that the photographer and the painter are in fact the same person. Producing an image of the same scene at the same time. Experiencing a particular set of emotions. But the painting seems to provide better access to the experience in its non-electromagnetic radiative aspects.

I feel this comes from observing how each brush stroke narrates the process of the light reaching the painter's eye, then being interpreted through the painter's model of the world. The light is combined with their childhood memories; visions of their favourite artists' works; their mood; the smells around them; the sun on their face and the cool glacial breeze creating a contrast in temperature sensations that mirrors the duality of the glacier's formidable sublime size, but ephemeral existence; and the duality of our cultural perception of the simultaneous vulnerable and threatening nature of the glacier. This is all mixed and in some way influences how the artist chooses colour, brush, and how to move their hand to reproduce the way they perceive the light interacting with the glacier.

It is the imperfections in the reproduction of the image that serve as experiential artifacts allowing us to perceive (or pretend to) more of the experience. Where the photograph is exacting and impartial, it is the humanity embodied in the brush strokes and choices of colour that give us access to additional dimensions. It is the difference between the exact image and the interpretation that animates the painting.

This perspective however, belies the tremendous humanity that exists between the camera and the image. All of the human toil over millennia. From fifth-century BCE observations by Chinese philosopher Mozi on the nature of light and the camera obscura, his realisation that light propagates in straight lines². To 16th century Italian Giambattista della Porta's description of the use of convex lenses to produce sharper, brighter images³. To German professor Johann Heinrich Schulze's demonstration that silver salts darken when exposed to light in 1717⁴, and later Englishman Thomas Wedgwood's pioneering production of silhouette images around 1800 by placing objects onto paper sensitised with silver nitrate⁵ — each contribution building upon the last, cumulatively giving rise to the technology that allows us to capture images. Then also, the specific emotion-driven choices of the camera design and engineering team in deciding how exactly to translate incoming light intensities into a representation of colour in terms of numbers that can later be used to reproduce the image in a visible form. This process again encompasses the culmination of thousands of years of mathematics driven by inspired and enlightened mathematicians and computer scientists who imagined and then created the systems we use to translate the visual world into digital language.

I ask then why do we experience the painting more richly than the photograph?

In some sense the photograph represents science — the collective striving for objectivity in our exploration of the world — that in a way hides the cumulative efforts of humanity to see the world in a way separate from our individual interpretation, versus art's explicit embrace of the individual perspective.

Both science and art are ways that we image our experience, but art seems to make accessible something that isn't captured in the full light waveform representation.

In geophysics, and seismology we create images. From the geophysicist and seismologist Jon Claerbout in his 1985 book Imaging the Earth's Interior ⁶

Philosophers ask the question, "What is knowledge?". As technologists, our answer is that there is a real world and there is also an image of it in our minds. Knowledge means that the two are similar. To help form images we use imaging devices such as microscopes, telescopes, cameras, television etc. In this book computers are imaging devices for seismic echo soundings. As an imaging device, a computer is in many ways ideal. A telescope is limited by the quality of its components. The image created by a computer is limited more by our understanding of mathematics, physics and statistics, than by limitations inherent in the computer.

We ultimately want to use these images to help us make decisions that let us flourish. Perhaps by obtaining the material we need to grow the grain, mill the flour, bake the bread, and spread the mayonnaise on the sandwich that the painter ate during their travels, producing the painting of the glacier we so enjoy looking at.

From Peter G. Knight's book Glacier: Nature and Culture ⁷

Earth is made into art - glacier is made into art - by the artist's choice of what to notice.