Notes On Roald Hoffmann’s Lecture “One Culture,” Part 4

Even more notes from Roald Hoffmann’s lecture at the Nobel Museum, titled “One Culture: Or the Commonalities and Differences Between the Arts and the Sciences.”

By this time, the Q&A session had started. The ice was broken by senior curator of the museum, Anders Bárány, also a theoretical physicist, who began his question by saying that chemists speak more about things they don’t understand, while in physics, there’s a bigger focus on such things as proving the existence of atoms. “As a poet,” he asked, “are there any poets in physics?”

Physics, Hoffmann answered, is primarily experimental. Theories are valued, but experiments matter more. Therefore, he said, physics is reductionist. Chemistry is different. (I don’t quite understand my notes, but I guess Hoffmann was saying that physics reduce their theories to be able to prove them experimentally, and that this isn’t the case for chemistry. Earlier in the lecture, Hoffmann said that “nature refuses to be simplified.”)

As for physicist poets, Hoffmann mentioned that Erwin Schrödinger wrote poetry after writing What is Life? (“not too great,” though). Robert Oppenheimer too, when he was young, and he had one of his poems published.

Hoffmann went on to talk about whether chemists feel a stronger need, than physicists, to express something spiritual. If I understand my notes correctly, he said that science is a spiritual, creative activity, as is the arts, and that science similarly requires devotion.

The next question was about why physicists often transfer to biology, whereas chemists don’t. This question tied on to the previous one, by asking whether this was because of a tradition in chemistry of looking at the world as it is (as in not reducing it?). He or she also asked whether there were any biologist poets.

Hoffmann mentioned a couple of biologist poets, but I didn’t get their names (Miroslaw something, Lauren something?), then went on to talk about the “gulf between chemistry and biology,” and how biologists often entered the field via chemistry; for instance, James Crick.

The third question mentioned that in Sweden, the course literature for physics includes a book titled “Physics for Poets.” I didn’t get her question, but Hoffmann answered by saying something about how the appreciation of simplicity in physics was culturally determined, then launched into a talk on modernism – cubism, atonal music; art forms that had to be learned to be appreciated (?), and which met resistance. In the visual arts, he continued, abstraction also had to be taught.

As I remember it, his point was that although humans favor simplicity, it doesn’t always come naturally to us. If it did, we’d also favor abstract art forms over realistic, but we don’t automatically appreciate them – we have to learn to. (Also mentions Rothko’s bars – “simple with a rhetoric of complexity.”)

More to come.