Scientific Imagination
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An Undeceptions Podcast. I don't think you ought to be doing this to yourself, man. I mean, Mexico is way the hell down there, and you're in here, and that's the way it is. Yeah, right. That's the way it is. It's down there, and I'm in here. I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. You get busy living, you get busy dying.

Moviegoers will recognise that scene from The Shawshank Redemption. It should be on everyone's must-see list. And yes, Mark, I have watched that movie. In 1994, it was voted the greatest film of all time. It's certainly up there for me.

It's also the brainchild of the fantastically successful author Stephen King. King has countless bestsellers and over 92 of his novels and short stories have been made into films and television programs. He's one of the world's most creative storytellers, with yarns covering possessed cars to death row angels. So where do his stories come from?

I get my ideas from everywhere, he says. But what all of my ideas boil down to is seeing maybe one thing. But in a lot of cases, it's seeing two things and having them come together in some new and interesting way. And then adding the question, what if? His imagination ties two unlikely things together. And voila, a fantastical storyline.

Musicians report experiencing similar creative lightning strikes. I look at life from both sides now From win and lose And still somehow it's life's illusions I recall

Joni Mitchell is a musical poet with amazing lyrical and melodic sensibility. Her Both Sides Now was released before I was born, but it is honestly one of my all-time favourite songs.

Talking about the source of her inspiration, she once wrote, "You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song in my eyes until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining."

That moment of clarity, that imaginative insight is something we often associate with the creative arts, the artistic process. But we don't typically think of it as part of the scientific process where logic and testing reign supreme. But that's probably wrong.

It seems that science, no less than art, fiction writing and music, is a right side of the brain thing, just as much as a left side of the brain thing. Now of course, when we do our episode on neuroscience we'll discover this left side right side thing isn't exactly right. But you know what I mean. It may just be that science is an imaginative, creative and even emotive enterprise.

just as it is obviously a rational, mathematical and evidence-based discipline, which to my mind, and to that of my expert guest, makes perfect sense. After all, the creator is an artist and logician in one. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, Biblical Critical Theory, by Christopher Watkin. That is quite something.

Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. And if this hour of undeceiving isn't enough, join the Undeceptions Plus community for just $5 Aussie a month.

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This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Walking on the walls is great as well. In fact, just there, about the best quarter of the walls to walk on, if you can see the flight of steps there, just behind that red bus, Yes.

There's some steps up onto the walls and you carry on round the cathedral close and you come down again. So you can look down into all the cathedral park and everything from the walls. And that's that's fun. I will definitely do that. My guest today might sound like an enthusiastic tour guide for the city of York in England's northeast. But that's just part of his multifaceted charm.

He's actually one of the most celebrated scientific minds in the UK. Tom McLeish is a theoretical physicist at the University of York.

He's also a fellow of the Royal Society, the preeminent scientific academy of the UK, and his work is renowned for breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of soft matter, like liquids, foams and biological materials. He is a nerd's nerd, a scientist specialising in polymer physics. But his formal title at the university is almost medieval, like the city of York itself. He is proficiently

Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics. More about that weird title in a moment. Tom is the author of The Poetry and Music of Science, Comparing Creativity in Science and Art.

He is at the cutting edge of a new or rediscovered perspective that celebrates the imagination of scientific discovery, as well as, of course, its rationality. And a clue to his approach is in that strange title, Professor of Natural Philosophy.

Can you tell us something about the meaning and the history of this venerable term? Yeah, I'm very excited and very grateful to York for doing this because they have actually dug up the old name for physics professors or even just for general natural scientists.

The word scientist, we know who invented it, was Michael William Puel. He was master of Trinity College Cambridge in the 1830s. And he invented it because he thought we needed a term to pull together all these geologists and astronomers and natural scientists. And artists have a term, don't they? So let's call us all scientists. But before then...

we would all have been called natural philosophers. And the old universities, the ancient universities, the ancient Scottish universities and the two older English universities still preserve one of their professorial titles will be the professor of natural philosophy. And there's an arch in the Oxford Quad that goes into the natural philosophy. Natural philosophy, there is indeed.

And it's a term that in my thinking and writing about science and the public wishing that we could make science as it inherently is more approachable for people, as well as making it clear its roots within faith and belief, I've often wished that.

we could go back to the old word, because if you unpack the word scientist, it comes from the Latin verb to know things, skio, skire. So if I'm saying a scientist, it's making a knowledge claim. It sets apart, it distances. It is not an invitational thing. It's a, well, leave me with the knowledge. But a natural philosopher is Greek, of course, with the philosophy bit. It comes from the love of wisdom. So actually, if you say I'm a natural philosopher,

unpack that word. You're saying, I love wisdom to do with nature. And isn't that invitational? Isn't it like, would you like to have some wisdom to do with nature too? It's much more humble and it's much more invitational. My home department is physics, you're right, but I've got a lovely remit to work across all departments here in York.

Tom is a great example of the growing realization or rediscovery that we need more than evidence and rationality in the scientific process. Because science itself, that is knowledge of the natural world, has a lot of overlap with art, philosophy, metaphysics, and yes, theology in its classical form.

It's a medieval idea, like most of the best ideas, contrary to popular ignorance. It was commonplace from the 500s through to the 1500s for the biggest brains to pursue at the same time language and rhetoric, music and theology, as well as mathematics and astronomy, all in an effort to understand the world in a holistic way.

Feel free to go back and listen to episode 74, Medieval Science, for more on that. Tom is even better than the proverbial Renaissance man. He's a medieval man. And one of the cool projects he's involved with is called Ordered Universe, which investigates the scientific work of medieval polymaths.

Well, they're considered polymaths now, but at the time, they were just well-rounded scholars. And one important name in this club is Robert Grosthest.

The only way we can understand the work of someone like Robert Grostes, this extraordinary Oxford, Lincoln, Paris, Hereford scholar of the early 13th century, great polymath, is to sit around the table with about 20 disciplines, all of which can understand a bit of what he said. And we're trying to put it back together again.

It to answer your question about what I personally got from this extraordinary thinker the 13th century when we started this project We thought wouldn't it be lovely if we could as I explained help our Humanities scholars in some of the technical mathematical aspects what they're reading and indeed so so I think we've been able to do we able to Point out that gross test treatise on color is talking about a mathematical three-dimensional space Just like ours a bit red green blue where color exists. We were able to

to translate his extraordinary Big Bang theory for the origin of the medieval cosmos into mathematical algebra so we could refine it and interrogate the text in new ways and so on. What we didn't expect is that just about every medieval 13th century treatise we've looked at, we looked at color, light, rainbows, comets, the motion of the planets and so forth.

At some point one of the scientists said, "Oh, that's an interesting way of thinking about it." Or, "That's an interesting question." Has anyone ever followed that up? And it turns out they haven't. So this first part of science that people forget, the inspirational formation of the question, the imaginative step into new science, we've got ten times now, just once or twice, from

Medieval texts. So the answer is, one of the answer questions is, it's given us at least 10 pieces of brand new science or the starting point for them anyway. That's the benefit of scholars across the range of disciplines working in cooperation. They put back together certain important insights that have been pulled apart in our modern atomistic approach to knowledge.

And one of those insights is the way creativity and imagination, right alongside rationality and evidence, undergird science. Certainly undergirded the medieval science of someone like Grosstest. But Tom says he's had glimpses of it in his own specialty of polymer physics. I asked him about one of his imaginative scientific breakthroughs.

We know that polymers are giant, like tiny strings. If we were to drink Alice in Wonderland or eat the mushroom and dive down, become a million times smaller, we would see a stringy soup of strings, right? But of course, one thing you can do with strings is tie knots in them. Or you can join strings in different ways to make nets or networks or different shapes or topologies, as the mathematicians would say. And here's the thing.

Some very clever chemists had managed to make fluids starting with fluids who each of whose molecule was a long single snake-like string they'd managed to turn each of the Molecules of fluid into something that looked more like a starfish knows I had three or four or five or six arms each of which radiated from a central point They're all very wiggly very tangled strings but nonetheless they were each each is for star-shaped and

And when you make a fluid out of those, that fluid can have a viscosity, a thickness, you know, a gooeyness, a gloopiness, which is a thousand, even a million times that of the same chemistry, same fluid, simply whose molecules are simply snakes rather than starfish. So it's not only the chemistry, not only the forces, it's just purely the mathematical shape of the molecules. And this was the problem to understand.

And it turned out that we thought we could understand it because you can think what the snakes do. The snakes wriggle along, wriggle along like winding up spaghetti or noodles from a plate. And they can escape and let the whole fluid escape from being trapped and tangled with their neighbors and the whole fluid can flow because of that. And that's what starfish can't do. Their arms get tangled with each other and they can't move.

In fact, the only way they can move is to sort of draw their arms in. You have to understand that all these molecules are, they're not alive, but they're wiggling around all the time because of heat. Heat, another great payoff for the molecular theory of matter. Heat is just explained not as some additional substance, but just as the random jiggling about of molecules. And the hot stuff jiggles faster than cold stuff. Right, so they're jiggling around all the time. We were overestimating

how bizarrely, if you could, we were getting billions and trillions times more viscosity. And that was when my PhD supervisor and I were stuck on this problem. And then there was this conversation we had

When I was really exhausted, he's a very clever guy, far cleverer than I was. We were having a conversation after a long day's work. I was absolutely knackered. I think we were on the train coming back to Cambridge and I just lost the plot. I couldn't understand anything he was saying. I knew this problem and he had some harebrained idea, but no, no idea. And then I went to bed. I had a good night's sleep. Next morning, I woke up.

Everything was absolutely clear. I knew what was going on, that these were sort of self-dissolving molecules, as each one gave a little bit of freedom to all the neighbors, they would give their freedom back. And we were making a mistake by thinking of each starfish as it were stuck in a fixed net. It's not a fixed net, it's a field of other starfish all doing the same thing. And I was able to couple it around mathematically and immediately, just in the same one morning,

Out came the numbers we'd been looking for. So we had this... The thing is, you saw it in your mind's eye, as it were, before you...

I think I saw this picture of all these molecules behaving together and each one making a bit of room for the others so they could give that room back and the whole thing accelerating each other. And then I was able to see how we could represent that in mathematics so we could turn that into numbers. What happened on this night is that although I had not consciously understood

what my colleague was saying, there must have been an unconscious level to which the words sort of like sunk. From the surface of the ocean of my mind, they'd sunk to the bottom and they'd formed and gelled and linked together there. And the next morning had floated back as a connected, created thought to the surface. And plenty of scientists are forwarding their fields through imagination.

And you say this is common, this imaginative vision for want of a better term. Yeah, or different versions of it are common. They're not commonly told because we're not encouraged to talk or publish our science in that way. We cover our tracks. We talk about the articles and the evidence and the deductions and the hypotheses. But we don't talk about, we talk about our route to testing hypotheses, but we're not encouraged to explain science.

The imaginative, tortuous, anything goes. No method holds road by which hypotheses arrive in the first place. That's what I got interested in because it's not talked about enough. Yeah, so I guess I'm asking you to describe for us, if it's possible, and I know you've written a 350-page book on this, but what's the relationship between...

the scientific method in scientific imagination. Right. So the way I put it, there's two ways of articulating this. Insofar as there is a scientific method, and we can talk this about another day, I'm not persuaded that there is a scientific method. Look, here's one thing. Look,

I'm a professional scientist. I've been a professional scientist for now 40 years, all right? If there was a scientific method, I'd have done a course on it, wouldn't I, in my formation as a scientist? No, I haven't. Now, historians and sociologists of science have done courses on method, but the scientists haven't.

I therefore deduce that it's more to do, the scientific method is more to do with a neat way of wrapping things up that we do if you're a sociologist or a historian of science than if you're a scientist. Be that as it may, the best thing that scientific method could possibly be, if it really exists for scientists, is the second half of the scientific process.

You know, there is a method, and Karl Popper wrote three books about this, you know, logic, scientific refutations, conjectures of refutations, all this stuff, logic of the scientific method, of how you test an idea when you've got it. Karl Popper, by the way, was one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science.

Popper is best known for his principle of falsification, which he used as a means of distinguishing genuine science from stuff that merely claimed to be science, stuff like astrology. He argued that the thing that makes science sciencey

is that it can be tested and conceivably proven false. Science, he said, should attempt to disprove a theory rather than attempt to support theoretical hypotheses. So you've got some sort of theory for how this works. You've got this theory that heat isn't a substance. It's about motion of atoms and work and heat are equivalent. So you've got this idea. This suggests an experiment. In fact,

It might suggest even the experiment as George McDonald's the poet and author pointed out is an act of formula experiment is an act of imagination But itself but but then you have some predictions from the theory you test them if they're right Okay, you put you live for another day if you're wrong, you're dead think again, but of course that assumes you've got a hypothesis and

So the first half of the whole scientific process, the climb up the mountain, is to get an idea that there are these long string-like molecules. And this is hard. When Hermann Staudinger...

German organic chemist proposed the idea of macroscopic molecules. He was ridiculed. He was ostracized He was laughed out of scientific court because as we all know molecules are precise and have Well determined structure and you know, it's very German accents or thing It's difficult to break them old and have new Sunday ideas It's as difficult as to have new poetic ideas write new plays write new symphonies decide what music whole vistas of avenues and

musical genres have never even been touched on, explored, ditto poetry and so forth.

It's like that. And so that's where imagination fits. Imagination fits fundamentally in the first half. What could be going on? It's a sort of act of recreation. It's recreating what the world might be in its substructure in our minds. And then it's inducing. You can't deduce, you see, the structure of the world from scientific observation or experiment. You only induce it. And that's imagination.

It's not just that scientists often need creativity and imagination before they mix stuff in the test tube or look out through the telescope. Tom says they frequently rely on immediate visual perception, just like a visual artist.

Yeah, so it's not ubiquitous and happened to everybody but I'd had all these conversations as I mentioned in the book of it but for scientists and I also had conversations with artists and musicians and and composers and so on to to sort of compare and contrast and and I noticed that many of the scientists that I was

Talking with including mathematicians actually thought think visually they don't think in algebra. They don't think in data Even they think visually they think in pictures now. I'm one of them actually I want to describe these star poems or wiggling around there's another another time when I had a dream of a daydream of a protein dancing about and Sending information across itself. So I think we visually to not all not all scientists do but but those that do conceive

their landscape, be it two-dimensional or three-dimensional,

In at least they talk about they use the very very similar language to the way that some of the creative artists will alter on to the creative Artists it's talk about their creative process. They'll sometimes draw outlines We're right outside York art galleys where speaking and the exhibition on at the moment is a recent discovery of Gainsborough's Sketches that were never thought to literally did they've been attributed to him for the first time just last year as a one of the discoveries

Thomas Gainsborough was a leading portrait painter in England in the late 18th century. I'd never heard of him before Tom mentioned him, but I looked him up. Oh my goodness, he's amazing. He was known as one of the most inventive painters of his time, and he was the only grand portrait painter of the era to pay special detailed attention to landscape art.

His painting, Mr and Mrs Andrews, has been described as a triple portrait of Robert Andrews, of his wife Frances, and their beautiful land around them.

Actually, there's a lovely dog at the heels, so it's maybe a quadruple portrait. Google it. It's really quite something. Anyway, back to Tom's actual point. Last year, it's a wonderful discovery. He made sketches. Some of them are even half-completed, the sketches he made for his landscapes. And you can see what he does. He takes a piece of charcoal and he draws the outline of his trees, just the outline, jagged, jagged, jagged, jagged outline, and trunks going down, the leaves going down.

And then the outline of the rocks. And then he'll fill in the detail afterwards. Not all artists, but many artists do that. I met composers, actually, who composed visually. One of the composers, Janet Graham, she's invented her own sort of coarse-grained, rough composition

a defocused musical score. It's not got bar lines and things, but it's got sort of bar lines seen from a distance. And she'll scratch out the piece with going up and down. And you can see how the whole formal piece of a whole symphony or a long piece will go. And then she'll fill in the detail. It's a narcissistic process. So that's one way in which science is like

Art, because we see almost literally sometimes in our mind's eye the rough picture that things must be. And then we'll beaver away at the detail. Just as Gainsborough later went to his canvas, his oil paints, literally paints every single leaf.

on that huge beech tree. Tom points out that this marrying of science with the more imaginative arts, a marriage that should never have ended in divorce, goes much further than big picture thinking. Technical skill is also central to both, obviously. Well, to good art anyway. And that brings us naturally to one of the other great art forms that's very much like science, music.

But we get to music by way of Fermat's last theorem. Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. One goes into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. One stumbles around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is.

And finally after six months or so you find the light switch, you turn it on and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. At the beginning of September I was sitting here at this desk when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation. It was the most important moment of my working life. Nothing I ever do again will

I love this. A Princeton mathematician brought to tears by a moment of mathematical insight, a revelation. Tom starts his chapter on music and mathematics by describing the scene we just heard. It's from the 1996 BBC series Horizons, and it features the mathematician Andrew Wiles from Princeton, then Oxford.

He recounts the moment when after months of effort and a lifetime of pondering, he realised the flaw in his first attempt to prove Pierre de Fermat's celebrated last theorem. The mathematical problem Wiles solved had been lingering since 1637, famously bedazzling mathematicians for more than four and a half centuries.

In the BBC scene, the producer freezes the frame on this prize-winning professor who's overcome with emotion over a piece of mathematics. How can maths be so beautiful, asks Tom? How can it evoke such depth of emotion, almost spiritual ecstasy?

Music, on the other hand, is something we completely understand, giving us goosebumps and making us cry. Like Julia Roberts crying at the opera in the 90s rom-com Pretty Woman. Did you enjoy the opera, dear? Oh, it was so good I almost peed my pants. I thought she liked it better than Pirates of Penzance.

But there is a connection between mathematics and music that goes right back to Plato, to Saint Augustine, and to all of the medieval philosophers. The 5th century theological giant Augustine wrote some very heavy tomes on music. Six books on rhythm and metre, and an intended six books on harmony, though we don't know if he completed those.

You might ask, why on earth is a theologian so interested in music? And the simple answer is, music was the audible embodiment of the numeric structure of reality. A tune is a mathematical thing. What makes a melody beautiful to our ears

is the way it pulls out of seemingly nothing a harmonious pattern which somehow resonates with the patterns of the physical world and with the patterns of our own brains. The uplift we can feel just by hearing good music, quite apart from lyrics,

seems to be the result of some harmonious loop or resonance between the structures of the sound waves and the structures of our minds.

And that is theological, or at least metaphysical, which is why music was a mandated subject in the liberal arts in the Western tradition from at least the time of Cassiodorus in the 6th century and firmly established by Alcuin of York in the 8th century. Proportion, number, proportion.

Harmony. These are all features of music and art. They are features of science as well. They are features of our universe. And until about five minutes ago, well, maybe a couple of centuries ago, most people saw these as deriving from the one eternal mind behind reality. So let's get back to music.

Insofar as geometry is the mathematicalization of our mapping out of space, so music bears that relationship to time. One, two, three, one, two, three, and interval and process. And music was the formal exploration of time.

Which is, of course, why there's also a strong link between music and astronomy, because the heavens were also, if you like, God's given all the cosmoses mapping of time, the regular cycles of seasons of the day and the year and the lunar month and so on. So once music is our human creative mapping out of time, there's obviously also a link between music and astronomy, which is God's mapping out of the regular cycles of time. And, of course, harmony is mathematical.

Melody is mathematical. Absolutely. Resolution is mathematical. Yeah, that's the point. So if you like, mapping out time is the additive arithmetic of time, but harmony is the proportional arithmetic. So a fundamental note, you pluck a string, ding,

and you then make the string half as long and you get... It's an octave. It's a whole octave above. And then you make it a third. You get a perfect fifth. All these wonderful intervals were known to bear mathematical relationship to the lengths of the pipes or the strings that produced them. So you can understand how music and mathematics together led to the mathematisation of the world, which is what we do in physics today. So right at the core.

of where we are. Professor MacLeish is a huge fan of Robert Schumann, the 19th century romantic composer. He makes Schumann an object of comparative study in his book, The Poetry and Music of Science. He argues that in his prolific work, Schumann is exhibiting two of the constant themes we can see in any radically new idea, whether in art, science, literature or music.

The first is the forging of connections between two distant streams of thought. And the second is what MacLeish calls the power of creative duality. Stay with us. It'll make sense in a moment. Can you give me a sense of who Robert Schumann was and the kind of musical culture he was surrounded by?

We think of him as a romantic composer that's romantic with a capital R alongside people like Brahms and Liszt

and some of the later Romantic composers, some people even distinguish and call it the late Romantic period. That's my friend Kirsty Bilehartz, a former professor of music, sonics to be precise, who, after completing her second PhD, just because, now works as a theologian, musician and philosopher at Excelsior College in Sydney. She is the biggest music nerd I know.

You might remember her from Season 3 in the amazing episode titled Creations Music. She's the ultimate phoner friend for this one. Then you have people like Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler...

still with the Germans at this point. And he was also very influenced by other romantics in genres of things like painting, poetry, literature. And I think that's really important to us thinking about his music. It was very visual for him and quite poetic. So I'm fascinated with this description that you've built up of him being romantic in that capital R sense. He's integrating music

poetry and yet I'm told it's highly mathematical that there's mathematics at play I mean I know there is in all music but Tom McLeish sees the sort of mathematical brilliance in it as well yes well I think this is also his looking back towards the Baroque

Now, I know you're a great fan of the solo suites by Bach for cello, for example. A lot of people are familiar with the two-part or three-part inventions of J.S. Bach for the piano. And when you look at the way that music like that is inventive, their solo instrument works. It's not by grabbing for lots of colours and textures through a diversity of instrumentation. The way that this

melodic complexity and interestingness and inventiveness is created is through structure and form and that's where I see the link to the mathematical side or the geometrical side in particular so mention of proportion and shape I think shape pattern proportion are actually the the mathematical criteria that are very interesting here in music so when you listen

to, for example, the first movement of the horn concert piece, you actually hear a very concise thematic language. In other words, there's really one melodic idea that he uses for the entire movement. But the way he achieves the interestingness is through things like, this is where the maths comes in,

Changing the proportions, inverting, turning upside down in a horizontal sense, like a reflection in a lake or a proportion. Mirroring back to front as well, retrograde and forwards if you like.

changing the amount that it's stretched or contracted, transposing into different keys, having that dialogue in space and time. So time being things like rhythm and how stretched a melody is. But space because you have the solo horns passing this melody amongst themselves in different registers and then between the soloists and the orchestra. But that

motivic way of working with the pattern and working then with the permutations of the pattern upside down, back to front, inside out, you know, transposed into different keys, stretched, contracted, changing the rhythms, varying it in as many ways as he could think of, I think shows very resourceful inventiveness. And so it's that kind of mathematical concept of patterns within patterns and permutations that I think takes its cue

even if subconsciously, from geometry or from pleasing symmetries. And on the one hand that might seem completely at odds with the poetic and nature which might maybe seem to be rambling and romantic in the free sense, but I think there is a connection because nature itself

Perhaps art echoes nature, I don't think we can say the other way around. Obviously nature has been there for a very long time.

But the created world, you see the same forms and we also find them aesthetically pleasing. So think of fractals and the shapes of mountains or crystals or snowflakes and the way that they form symmetrically in incredibly detailed patterns. - Kirsty, I'm so glad I phoned a friend on this one. And now I can't wait to go and listen to the Four Horns concert piece. - Yes. - With all of that in mind. Thank you so much.

We've been listening to the Konzertstück Op. 86. That's Schumann's concert piece for four horns played by the Seattle Orchestra. And by the way, that's the hidden code for this episode if you happen to be playing along in the one millionth download competition in August. Code Schumann.

Schumann. Now, classical music might not be your forte, but Tom McCleese says you don't have to know anything about music or mathematics to appreciate their shared beauty. In his book, Tom puts musical and mathematical notation side by side for the reader's appreciation. Even if you can't read either set of squiggles, you can certainly get a sense of both as elegant patterns. And that's his point.

But I wanted to say, look, with a musical score, you don't have to know what a crotchet is or where F is on the stave. There are simple ways that you can appreciate the beauty of a musical score just by knowing that when the little dots are high, there's a high note. So the little dots are low on the gate, it's low notes, right? They just watch the pattern.

And time goes from left to right. So now just, it's like a sort of graph. Now do you get the, do you see there's some notes that are runs there? Do you see this is big, big, long notes, arching things? Do you see where this phrase is going and how this helps the creative process? And then I, having prepared the way ever so gently, I said that some people who don't read music would have found that bit quite difficult. Now, some bits, people who don't do mathematics at all will find the next bit,

It's difficult, but don't panic. Don't panic. Look at the way these letter forms dance around each other. Look at the beautiful structure. Look at where the overall shape... Don't worry about not understanding the details. Very few people do. But look at the overall shape. And the reason I wanted to just exhibit the notation is to say, look, here is the notation. It has a beauty of its own in the same way musical scores or in the same way pictures do. So...

I hope that works. Looking at a mathematical equation or a musical score and recognising the similar beauty in its structure is one thing. To get to that structure requires, at some point, a blank piece of paper. The process of music and mathematics is also mirrored. Mathematics, like music, explores values.

vast and intricate structures as well as elements of detail, MacLeish writes. Mathematicians construct proofs but debate over how much of their work is discovery, how much invention. Like music, there are true but dull results, trivial as well as profound. Some mathematics is pedestrian, some breathtakingly elegant.

Both require a germ, a starting point that breaks the sterile symmetry of the blank paper or empty stave. And the choice of project is bewildering. Possible starting points are too numerous to contemplate, but the potentially fruitful are rare.

For Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, MacLeish says that his protracted mathematical journey consisted of struggle, incubation, verification and eventual clarification of a result that drew from much of modern mathematics in unforeseen ways to reach its final destination.

Schumann's journey in composing his concert piece for Four Horns was similar. He drew inspiration from the great musicians like Bach, whom he admired, but also was influenced by the romantic literary writers of his day. It was a combination of two ideas that hadn't been brought together before. Both the mathematical equations and musical scores require immense imagination. One is considered art,

The other, science. But really, both are arty and science-y at the same time. And after the break, we're going to push this boat out into even deeper waters.

We've seen the links between science and imagination, the visual arts and music, but what about emotion? Does emotion play any role in the scientific enterprise, as it obviously does in music and the arts? Stay with us. MUSIC

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.

Amy, Amy, Amy. Come in. There's something I need to tell you. Wow, you look amazing.

That's not what I need to tell you, but you do. What's wrong? Something incredible just happened. Remember when you were telling me about my bow tie and how a little asymmetry is good? Yeah? My equations have been trying to describe an imperfect world, and the only way to do that is to introduce imperfection into the underlying theory. So instead of super symmetry, it would be super asymmetry? Super asymmetry. That's it!

That's the world's most popular theoretical physicist, Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory. It's sometimes pretty fun, not least because it popularizes some pretty heady concepts, but also because it often links science to the emotions, to enthusiasm, though perhaps not in the poignant way you heard earlier from Andrew Wiles, whose proof of Fermat's last theory led him to wonder and tears.

Professor Tom McLeish is eager to point out that science need not be the emotionless world of pure rationality that some think it is. Emotion is in fact key.

One of the things you draw from the medieval world is the role of emotion in science, or to use the medieval terminology, the affections of knowledge. So some of my listeners might be puzzled that there would be any connection between science...

and emotion. So can you help us out? What's the relationship between intellectual insight and desire, emotion? Surely. Absolutely. Well, this was one of my most delicious discoveries.

doing the research for this book. Because I was interested in scientists talking about their creative process and then realizing that it was like my creative process and that was like art is a creative process, there is this. And then I noticed that everybody, when they told these stories, these personal stories, whether they were poets or whether they were mathematicians or astronomers,

would inject emotion into the telling of it. I mean, actually, sometimes they would weep. It's a recapitulation of what they'd known before when it first happened. It's that sort of shadow emotion. But in any case, all of them described emotion

different emotions engaging at different stages with their intellectual pathway. And I thought, who's written about this? And let me sort of go back. And actually, the clearest articulation of this I found in, guess who, Robert Groff's test. Back again. There we are in the 13th century. They know about this. And they write about this affectus and aspectus, which is the affect, the emotion, and sight. It's slightly rotated around a bit, but that's basically what it is.

And it's golden honesty and it maps onto the most honest stories I've had before. So just think about how difficult it is to bring something, this miracle of bringing something de novo into the world that's never existed before, whether it's a poem or a play or whatever it is. It's hard. Yeah, it's hard work. It involves huge amounts of labour and massive disappointment and getting nowhere for ages. If that's not fuelled by desire...

and a sort of love. I mean, without the emotions, the most cerebral of people don't have the fuel in the tank to see things through.

And of course, there are other emotions on the way. There's joy when you think you see something and then there's despair when it all goes away in a puff of logic and no, that's no good. And darkness of despair and grief where nothing happens forever. And then a tingling, tingling feeling of hope, hopefulness and joy when you think, oh, perhaps there is a way through to solving this problem after all.

This interweaving of the rational and the emotional challenges common ideas about the structure of the brain and fits much better with the latest neuroscience. The idea that the humanities are more emotional than the sciences just isn't right. That was honestly my prejudice. I was expecting that and I couldn't write that.

I had to write what I found, which was that the whole creative process, the cognitive or cerebral aspects are so tangled up with the emotive or affective, you can't tease them apart. And I realised, actually, we're whole beings. Of course we are. We're whole minds. Our emotions and our minds and our rational minds, you can't be teased apart.

They're part of the same thing. And in fact, you could even ask the neurology, there's some pseudo-neuroscience which says, you know, left brain, right brain, emotions are right. No, that's not how that works either. You can show that both hemispheres of the brain light up in both cognition and emotion. So I'm sorry, guys, you know, there is absolutely no evidence, circumstantial evidence in terms of narrative or experience or even neuroscience that points to this separation. And that's something which surely...

can, I hope, retell the human story of science because we've got ourselves into a mess. We've told a lie about science. We've said it's not emotional, it's purely logical, it's not creative. And I know this because this is what the school kids have told me and this is why they don't choose science. And my heart breaks because we've sold them a bummer. We really have. If we were more truthful, we'd find lots of great, great young people engaging with science.

and finding much joy in it. And am I right that in this 13th century model of affections and cognition, they're recursive? Yes. That is, the affections do have to be schooled by knowledge. Yeah.

And knowledge has to be directed by properly schooled affections. Yes. Yeah. And it's not only are they mutually schooled, they're also moral. There's a whole ethical dimension behind this. Yeah, desire. The love of the good. The love of the good and the hate of the bad. So hate is an important emotion as well. So the role of hate is to drive us away from what is bad. And the role of love is to attract us towards what is good. But we know, we also rationalize what is good and bad.

So there are ways in which we can rationally direct our emotions. We need to be mistresses and masters of our emotions in order to live full human beings, as human beings not only as individuals but in families, societies too. But our emotions need to energise and drive our cognitive facilities too. This leads to what some will think is a controversial question. This idea of the love of the good.

raises the question of the purpose of science. I mean many people say science doesn't have a telos, it only has a hot os, a way, a method. I know you don't agree with that.

What is the purpose of science, Tom? Well, of course, I have to think about it. I wrote the end of science, pun intended. I love the word end, meaning both telos being the end of the road, but also the purpose, the end of where we're going. And so I wanted to explore this very much. And the reason I wanted to explore this is because although purpose has been kind of driven out of academies,

in the last, well, you know, generations. You're not supposed to talk about purpose, whether you're a humanities scholar, whether you're a scientist. And even biologists have particularly developed, because evolution looks so purposeful, biologists have developed a sort of rhetoric for covering themselves. Yeah, it's a neat shorthand, you know, these beaks evolved for the long bills for the purposes of getting insects out of things.

However, however,

Human beings act purposefully all the time. This is my empirical observation. I'm not being a theist when I say that. I'm just being a humanist. I'm just being interested in human beings. Even my friends who deny free will, and I have several friends who denied the existence of free will, don't live as if they denied free will. They live as if they had it enacted purposefully and followed ends deliberately and made choices towards an end. So I know we need to talk about purpose. And of course,

you know, absolute cards on sleeve, a purpose of a system, an end of a system, I suppose can be, you can sort of,

all agents in a system could decide on a purpose. But purposes are much more set by external, by creators. And so that's where theistic thinking I think helps, because I think we have tools. I think a Christian approach to academy has certain academic

analytical tools at our disposal that the atheist approach does not have. And one of those tools is a freedom to be allowed to talk really meaningfully, constitutively about purpose, including an externally framed purpose, including a moral purpose.

And so that's what, because I found, you know, I found being a Christian actually in this way and many other ways, one of the reasons I found it intellectually enriching and intellectually creative. And so we can talk about the purpose of science within a theistic framework. I found that sits with the larger question, what's our purpose as human beings? And our purpose as human beings has a big clue, a big clue in our biblical story of being made in the image of God.

And I've thought for a long time about what it means to be made in the image of God. The Imago Dei has been expanded, of course, for centuries by theologians. Does it mean we have a moral right or a wrong? Does it mean we have love? Does it mean we can sacrifice? But the first thing that God does in the biblical story is, of course, create something.

So I would have thought that the first interpretation that you might want to make of being made in the image of God is that our role is to be actors, creators as well. And then we think, well, what should we create? What do we create? Can we create beings and universes? Well, no, God does that.

But insofar as human beings are made in God's image, our purpose, God's self-made purpose is to design the world, design and create the world to love and to act in love and to be in relationship with love with him. Our purpose, if we're in God's image, maybe it's to create an image of the world.

in a way that will help us to serve each other and the world and the material world. And I think, well actually, that's really helpful because what is science if it's not the creation of an image of the world?

We don't, when we talk about, physicists talk about electrons, we don't rub up against, we don't immediately experience an electron in its bare material, natural, weird, inhuman, what George Steiner called the inhuman, sheer, inhuman otherness of matter. But we get as close as we can to it, we talk about our model of an electron, we've created an image of an electron, that's what we're talking about. And the more we learn about electrons, the more we hope our picture of an electron will look more and more like the real one.

But that's what we do. And there's a sense in which our scientific purpose is to create this image of the world so that we can serve God better in the world. The Book of Job, Chapter 28. People assault the flinty rock with their hands and lay bare the roots of the mountains. They tunnel through the rock. Their eyes see all its treasures. They search the sources of the rivers and bring hidden things to light. But where can wisdom be found?

Where does understanding dwell? No mortal comprehends its worth. It cannot be found in the land of the living. The deep says, "It is not in me." The sea says, "It is not with me." It cannot be bought with the finest gold, nor can its price be weighed out in silver. It cannot be bought with the gold of Ophir, with precious onyx or lapis lazuli. Neither gold nor crystal can compare with it, nor can it be had for jewels of gold.

Coral and jasper are not worthy of mention. The price of wisdom is beyond rubies. The topaz of Kush cannot compare with it. It cannot be bought with pure gold. Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds in the sky. Destruction and death say, only a rumour of it has reached our ears.

God understands the way to it, and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. You frequently point people to the book of Job. What on earth has an ancient text like that got to do with a lovely scientist? Well, look, here's the thing. Think about music. If music is really deeply part of being human,

then we would expect it to have been deeply part of being human for as long as we've been human. And although I don't think 3,000 years ago anyone would have made anything out of a Mozart symphony, you know, let alone anything by Bartok, you know, we find

wonderful evidence that stringed bows were used as instruments, that horns were drilled, little holes in the side where fingers could stop and lo and behold they make the same notes that flutes and recorders make now. And this is from 20 or 30 thousand years ago. So music, because it's so deeply human, becomes identifiable in the past as on the journey, not as the music we know as we play music now, but on the journey towards it.

So, you know what I'm going to say. If science, or what we call science now, by another name in different ages, is so deeply human, it drives us to look into the structure of the world, to create this image of it, it's part of what we mean, you'd have expected that same drive to appear, yes, in different forms, but also on the road to science we have now in different ages. And so it proves to be. So the book of Job says,

is to science what that ancient reindeer flute is to music, I think.

And therefore, it is of interest to scientists to know where our scientific drive comes from. Job 38 to 42, which is, I think, the most beautiful, extraordinary deep nature poem coming out of all of the ancient world, is doubly significant for science because it's a poem whose every stanza is a question.

And as we've talked about before, it's questions, the imaginative questions, which are like the axe strike that chips the rock in the right plane or that cuts the wood in the right plane. The creative question is the important step in science, not so much the answer, which follows later. So questions are, do you know where the...

The hail and ice comes from the storehouses of light. Can you command the day to dawn? Do you know the laws of heavens and can you apply them to the earth? That's a question in Job 38. These are questions which are foundation questions to science. And I think it's deeply important that they come from this ancient Hebrew text about science.

about the awkwardness and chaotic, apparent inhumanity of the world, which touches with our current questions about the chaotic and difficult relationship we have with the mature world around us. So actually, I think it's very relevant and very important.

Tom has a passion, an affection in the medieval sense, for opening up science to everyone. For him, it's almost like a religious mission, as it was in the Middle Ages. He speaks of science as a palace with many entrances.

He tells me that he first picked up this idea from Andrea Wolff, who received a prestigious award for her biography of the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, titled The Invention of Nature.

The Royal Society, we have a book, a science writing book prize every year. And you can imagine it's like the Oscars, you know, four contestants and they read 10 minutes from their books and then Brian Cox gets up with the envelope to a great, you know, flashing lights and sound and the winner is Andrea Wolfe for Inventing Nature. The winner is Andrea Wolfe. Then we have the Prosecco afterwards, you know, and I go up to Andrea and say, "Congratulations."

"Who are you looking forward to telling about this award?" And she said, "I'm looking forward to telling my German chemistry teacher, my former school teacher." She was still alive, she's a very old woman, but I wanted to tell her. And I said, "Well, Andrea, that's lovely." And she said, "No, it's not. It's not nice at all." Because this was the woman who told me I was a stupid little girl, I would never understand science, I should write about cookery and gardening and stick to those pursuits.

And she said, "Yeah, you see, it's true that I had difficulties at school, but I know I can understand science because I've had to understand Hornbolt's very subtle science." And then she said this beautiful thing. She said, "Science is like our beautiful palace with hundreds of doors." But she said, "At school, should we only show kids one door?"

And we can't go through that door. I could go through another door, which was writing biography. And, you know, since then, I said, well, one of my purposes is to hack the thorns away from those other doors to find other doors into the palace of science that other people can go to that aren't just the usual school course. MUSIC

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Well, it's this season's Q&A, and you've served up some of your trickiest questions ever. Why is Israel so special? Why won't sin get in the new creation just like it did in the first creation? If God knows everything, why bother praying? How do we square dinosaurs and the Bible? Plus tons more. In fact, I'm way behind telling producer Kayleigh how I'm going to answer them. So maybe I'll just ad lib. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Grossest Hadley. Editing by Richard Humwe. Social media by Sophie Hawkshaw. Administration by Lindy Leveston. Our online librarian is Siobhan McGuinness. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.