Book Review : Artists and Scientists: Enduring Verities

Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science by S. Chandrasekhar (University of Chicago: $23.95; 170 pages)

With some regularity, distinguished scientists in their later years pull together their thoughts of a lifetime and tell us what it all means. They give up the laboratory and examine the broad themes that science suggests and illuminates.

This is commendable work, and the results are frequently interesting if not earth-shaking. Physicists, as they age, seem particularly drawn to the philosophical aspects of their work. It’s as if the strange discoveries of 20th-Century physics demand a fuller explanation.

S. Chandrasekhar follows in this tradition, with a slight twist. A lifetime in science--he published his first book on astrophysics in 1939, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the evolution of stars in 1983, and is now, at 77, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago--has led him to wonder about the ways of scientists. This book is a collection of speeches Chandrasekhar has delivered over 40 years on the questions of how scientists work and what propels their quest.

The answer, given in the title, “Truth and Beauty,” is that beauty moves scientists no less than it does artists. Chandrasekhar weaves his inquiry through several case studies that support his conclusion, and he cites the writings of many other scientists to the same effect.

Different Career Styles

One of his major sub-themes--which occupies one entire lecture and is reprised in several others--is the different career styles of scientists and artists. Typically, he argues, scientists make their greatest contributions at or near the beginning of their careers, while artists grow and mature throughout their creative years, achieving their masterpieces near the end of their lives.

“It is often the case,” Chandrasekhar writes in the preface, “that the most ‘important’ discovery of a scientist is his first. In contrast, the deepest creation of an artist is equally often his last. I continue to be puzzled by this dichotomy.”

In his chapter on this subject, easily the best in the book, Chandrasekhar compares Shakespeare, Beethoven and Newton. In the case of Shakespeare and Beethoven, he argues that their greatest work came at the end of their lives, and that their work showed marked and noticeable depth, complexity and insight throughout their careers.

In the case of Newton, on the other hand, Chandrasekhar notes that both of his great discoveries--calculus and physics--were made at an early age, and he never did important scientific work after that.

Part of what makes this lecture, which was delivered in 1975, so appealing is Chandrasekhar’s erudite discussions of the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven. While repeatedly apologizing for his lack of competence in these fields, he demonstrates a subtle appreciation of their work and their frames of mind.

Scientists tend to know a lot. They have breadth that exceeds their specialty. It’s a pleasure to read Chandrasekhar’s comparisons of one of the greatest writers in English, one of the greatest composers in music and one of the greatest scientists who ever lived.

Period of Meditation

When Beethoven was 47, having completed a long period of meditation during which he composed very little, he said, “ Now I know how to compose.”

By contrast, Chandrasekhar writes, “I do not believe that there has been any scientist, past 40, who could have said, ‘ Now , I know how to do research.’ And this to my mind is the center and the core of the difference: the apparent inability of a scientist to continually grow and mature.”

Are Chandrasekhar’s examples representative? No doubt there are counter-examples, artists whose initial works were their greatest and scientists whose important work came later in life.

But I am prepared to accept Chandrasekhar’s distinction between scientists and artists and wonder with him why this is so. Perhaps artistic beauty is more complex than scientific truth. It takes life experience to be able to grapple with the verities of existence. Next to that, physics is child’s play. Are artistic truths somehow deeper than scientific truths?

Maybe these questions are best addressed in a different medium, as if to prove that there are limits to rationality. Chandrasekhar never quite comes to an answer, though he asserts: “Beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.”

His flawless discussion lacks an equally compelling conclusion, which is no complaint. It just shows how hard the questions are.