Fractals rhyme

From medium.com

One of my pastime thoughts is that if I ever learn enough to warrant it, I would want to teach a "Science for Art Majors" and an "Art for Science Majors" pair of classes, as I think that the separation of the two cultures has largely had an enervating effect on our society.  Science drives our worldview, but our artists being ignorant of it are unable to search for expression in a human fashion.  By comparison, our scientists continue with a course that is unaware of how much of the human experience must be accounted for - let alone the benefits that a liberal education bring, and the fact that scientists are increasingly called upon to act as advisors.

In any case, what follows is something of a fragmentary discussion I had with myself earlier, and would perhaps be a partial lecture or idea in one or both of such classes.  

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”

The famous Walter Pater quote.  Now paired with Rutherford:

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

I would like people to think about these two for a second, for even if one disagrees with the statements I believe they point toward something key in both endeavors.  

What is it that art is after?  Obviously asking such a sweeping question is perhaps presumptuous, and to offer an answer even more so.  However, I am going to try in order to frame the issue as I understand it.  In the end, art to me seems to be the human outlet for expression of experience, an outlet which by and large is able to bypass words because they are too limited.  It is one of those habits we fall into easily, that we think that our words are our ideas, and that our ideas are our experience or Reality (and when I say "idea" I mean it in the broadest sense of concept or symbol).  It is an error I believe even more reinforced by the ascendance of science, that if something cannot be put into words then it does not exist.  

Artists, then, are in the business of annealing these transitions.  For either giving us an insight into their ideas in a way that mere words could not, and, most aspirationally, seeking to perhaps even elevate us to a glimpse of that experience ourselves.  In this long struggle for expression, two trends appear (at least in the West, I cannot speak for elsewhere), which can be broadly termed the Classical and the Romantic.  The former favors form, clarity, and often immortality; the latter the particular, the obscure, and the fleeting.  It is a back and forth, where one approach is ascendant, then the other, and either taken to extremes is moribund.  Ultimately, though, it is about content of experience and finding a way to bring it out.

This, to me, is how I then understand Pater above.  Music is unsymbolic, and while symbols act as convenient vessels for experience (giving it form), ultimately they are all handmaidens (they cannot be the content).  

Scientists aspire in some sense to achieve the exact opposite.  If you read a scientific paper you will notice that the first person is never used and that often references to the researchers entirely omitted; it is as though the experiment ran itself, and that it does not matter who was there.  If art aspires to the state of music, science aspires to the state of physics, which in turn aspires to the state of math (or logic) wherein it is all form and no content.  It does not matter what is in the A's, B's, and C's of a syllogism, and it does not matter whether the object falling from the tower is a cannonball, a rock, or a person so long as one has one or two basic characterizing measurements of them (obviously I simplify the situation; perhaps I should say falling on the moon).  

Last semester I had the opportunity to read several papers about the growing field of "Systems Biology."  It is a curious thing, for as far as I can tell it is yet another sallying forth of the physics mindset into biology.  Its main proponents are indeed the chemists, the biophysicists, and the computer scientists.  It is their goal to find the essential qualities of the biological systems and interpret them as circuit diagrams, much in the same way that once one has figured out the functions of resistor, capacitor, and so forth the details about their composition do not matter, just their given values.  In this way, they believe, at long last biology can be brought into the realm of a proper, predictive science.

What I find particularly telling (and admittedly a bit humorous) is that it has a real hostility to being conflated with molecular biology, which has essentially pursued the same dream its entire history.  It's the vanity of small differences, that with the previous program of molecular biology failing to account for all of life and reduce it to a few pieces we can grasp, a new group has "broken off" and must differentiate itself while essentially doing the same thing, although setting its sights more broadly.

Now, I don't mock this endeavor, but I find it extremely interesting because in my experience biology lies at the tipping point of science.  Science wants to be the ultimate Classical endeavor, and in order to do so the universal must always be able to account for the particular.  Biology as a discipline has clearly yielded a sense of order, with some fields such as population genetics being both amenable to and incredibly informative with such approaches.  

Yet there are always the naturalists, the ecologists, the people who simply like being out in the field and appreciating each species for itself.  It's not that they despise theory or cannot understand it, but like some puff of Romantic spirit that finds itself in expression, they take umbrage with the idea that the diversity they relish is merely noise.  Also with the presumptuousness of people who sit behind desks all day dictating what it is the people in the field must be seeing. 

As such, biology has never quite submitted to the physics paradigm while not yet garnering the scorn that psychology and the social sciences have for their yet greater chaos.  We seem to at least be able to point to something.  So the question in biology goes unanswered: will we know everything when we learn all the principles or study all the organisms?  Is our knowledge to be found in the universal or the particular?  This is obviously somewhat a false dichotomy in practice, as indeed it is always a false dichotomy in practice, since we always need both to make sense of anything in a mysterious epistemological quandary.  But nonetheless, I find its expression in biology particularly illuminating, as both sides manage to be so compelling at once.

It reminds me of history in a way.  Grand theories of history have come and gone, most of them coming to rather swift ruin.  It has happened so much that nowadays it seems to me that historians have resigned themselves to a degree of stamp collecting, of studying only their particular system of events with little hope of applying it to another.  Yet despite it all, I can't help but think Twain has a point:

"History never repeats itself but it rhymes."

Nobody who takes time to study history can miss the immediate similarity of many circumstances to others, especially to one's own.  That is one of its great values is to learn from it; if everything was particular and nothing general, then history by definition would be a science without application.  So how to reconcile this with history's general inability to predict the future?  I don't have an answer, but I have a metaphor.

Fractals Rhyme

I think that everybody who gets a college education, or wants to be educated at least, ought to spend time learning about chaos and fractals.  I believe they offer a sort of avenue out of our conundrum, if we can somehow figure out how, because fractals rhyme too.

Looking at the image above, its self-similarity is self-evident.  You can't miss it.  Yet no part is identically that of any other; zooming in and in and in the same motifs repeat, but none of them are exact copies of any other.  It is the same with the the strange attractors, those multi-dimensional structures which confine the possibilities but due to sensitivity are useless for predicting its precise state long into the future.

I feel there is something here, a version of looking at the world that acknowledges order but admits sensitivity on the particulars.  That there are other forms of order other than the simple symmetry we easily recognize, the simple repetition we easily notice.  I haven't gotten the idea there yet, but just this piece has been enough to tantalize me since I first read about the subject years ago.

In any case, I end this essay with the same inconclusiveness so many others end with, feeling I have somehow said nothing with all my words.  There has to be a way to put the world back together.