purple drifts melt into ease
and a clockwise tick
explains a location
that always returns to its source.
echoes become sources,
and sources a signature.
so loops make chains
and chains
progress
“The aim of Mathematical Physics is not only to facilitate for the physicist the numerical calculation of certain constants or the integration of certain differential equations. It is besides, it is above all, to reveal to him the hidden harmony of things in making him see them in a new way.”
-Henri Poincaré
Having spent most of my adulthood pursuing both science and art, I eventually realized that the pursuit of scientific (and mathematical) exploration shares many basic concepts with artistic exploration, the foremost aspect being the attempt to see the world in a new way and to convey these novel observations through experimentation.
As a neuroscientist and artist, I have always been keenly aware of our limitations in the perception of our physical reality. Science and math do their best to describe a reality that we observe with our sensory systems, primarily through our eyes, which map our world onto a pair of 2-dimensional surfaces (the retinas), which our brain then translates as a 3-D environment. Fully 2/3 of our brain processes visual information in a variety of ways. And despite the caricature of science as unbiased observation, scientific exploration – like artistic exploration – is driven by intuition, based on our abilities to perceive and analyze. Again, Poincaré, one of the most important mathematicians of the last century, said it best:
“Pure analysis puts at our disposal a multitude of procedures whose infallibility it guarantees; it opens to us a thousand different ways on which we can embark in all confidence… Who shall tell us which to choose? We need a faculty that makes us see the end from afar, and intuition is this faculty. It is necessary to the explorer for choosing his route; it is not less so to the one following his trail who wants to know why he chose it.”
Thus, I continued to make art in parallel with my scientific career until I had my first child, when I realized I could do two jobs but not three. Art was relegated to the back-burner indefinitely.
But all along the way, I “joked” that instead of going for tenure – when most scientists become full-time managers, having their most creative years behind them, I would retire early to become a full-time artist. A few years ago, in 2016, I made that joke a reality and retired completely (well, mostly) from science to become a full-time artist.
CEL 2020