A Cosmic Muse

Natural History, Dec, 2000 by Neil de Grasse Tyson

At the dawn of the new century, an astrophysicist looks at popular culture and detects signs that the arts and sciences are headed toward fusion.

Science and art are profoundly similar in many ways. Both emerge from the deepest regions of human creativity, nurtured by an individual's passion for and commitment to a discipline. In everyday conversation, we are as likely to hear (or to say ourselves) "She's got it down to a science" as to hear "He's raised it to an art."

In other ways, though, science and art are profoundly different. Each of the most important scientific theories of all time came from the minds of undeniably great scientists but would eventually have been discovered by other scientists. Occasionally an important theory or discovery has been rushed to publication due to the author's fear of being scooped by someone else. Leonardo da Vinci, however, didn't have to "rush paint" his Mona Lisa for fear that somebody else would create an identical portrait. And if Ludwig van Beethoven had never been born, nothing remotely approximating his famous Ninth Symphony would ever have been written by anybody, anywhere, at any time.

Art can be described as an expression of the beauty, the tragedy, and the complexity of the human condition. Central to expressing this complexity is the need to explore our sense of place and purpose in the world. If the discoveries of science are viewed by the layperson as detached from this calling, then one would never expect science to inspire an artist's creativity--or, more specifically, one would never expect an artist to be attracted to scientific themes.

For much of the twentieth century, science fiction's image of scientists was of the lab-coat-wearing, test-tube-holding, unkempt-looking, wild-haired, antisocial variety. But what mattered more than this stereotype was that most scientists conducted their work within the confines of laboratories and rarely communicated their findings to the general public unless the results had direct implications for a nation's health or defense. Even then, these outcomes were only occasionally presented by the scientists themselves.

True, the great physicists Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Faraday, Eddington, Jeans, and Einstein all wrote popular accounts of their work. But they were exceptions. Within the past decade or so, it's become expected (and even common) for scientists, as well as traditional science writers, to communicate discoveries to the public through magazines, books, television, and public lectures. Nowadays, during any week of your choosing, a dozen science programs appear on PBS and cable TV channels, and multiple science stories make headlines in the daily newspapers.

Take a recent two-month stretch in my own life: I saw the Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen on Broadway, and the audience was transfixed by the retelling of important episodes in the history of particle physics in connection with the making of the first atomic bomb. I noted that Brian Greene's Elegant Universe, a book on the search for a theory of everything, was still high on best-seller lists. I attended a dance performance entitled Elements, which featured four dancers (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, of course) and was inspired by modern geology and geophysics. And I attended another dance performance, called Strings, which was inspired by string theory and the major tenets of the big bang theory. I also read about a new play that explored mathematical theorems. Its title? Proof.

These new domains for the creative voice surely reflect a broader movement in society at large. If artists' choice of subject matter is any indication, the public has embraced science as never before--not as something cold and distant but as something vibrant and within reach. People are beginning to feel that the cosmic discoveries made by members of our own species--from the mysteries of the big bang to the stellar origin of the chemical elements of life and the mapping of the human genome--belong to us all. People see, perhaps for the first time, that they are no longer bystanders in the scientific enterprise but vicarious participants.

As Natural History's new century begins, I wonder whether the discoveries of modern science--those of astrophysics in particular--are numerous enough and accessible enough to warrant the declaration that we are entering a new era of artistic inspiration. Like the religious and mythological sources that so influenced art before and during the Renaissance, the cosmos has become a thematic source for the arts of our own day. I'd bet that the theories and discoveries of modern science have a limitless capacity to awaken human emotion and trigger unbridled wonder. If so, artists can now count among their many muses the secrets of the universe.

A columnist for this magazine since 1995, astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson ("A Cosmic Muse") is the Frederick E Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. A New Yorker by birth, he credits his career choice to his childhood visits to the Planetarium and an education at the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson's long-standing research interest has been the structure and chemical composition of the Milky Way galaxy. His most recent book is The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist (Doubleday, 2000).