Gentle blogee, I apologize for being gone so long. Among many things, the virus has drastically altered our lifestyles and priorities and routines. I am optimistic that a vaccine will be developed before the end of the year and begin an end to the suffering. But on to other ruminations , , ,
I’ve often been fascinated by the fact that Relativity and Cubism were invented at the same time, around 1905 – both revolutions in our perception of the world. Relativity invented by Einstein, and Cubism by Picasso and Braque. Besides their emergence within the same year, some interesting parallels connect the two revolutions. The idea behind cubism is to take objects apart and reassemble them in an abstract way, showing the different pieces from different perspectives, instead of from a single perspective as in the original object. A cubist painting makes us see a thing from many different perspectives simultaneously.
The idea behind relativity
is that there are no absolutes – no absolute motion, no absolute time, no absolute space. For example, the ticking rate of a clock depends on the perspective of a particular observer. Two different observers in motion relative to each other will observe the same clock to tick at different rates. Relativity is not just a matter of appearance. The flow of time itself is different for different observers in motion relative to each other. It is not true that a second is a second is a second. The changes in the flow of time are very small unless the relative speed between observers is near the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. 
At the modest relative speeds we experience in daily life (an airplane travels at a speed only one millionth the speed of light), we don’t notice discrepancies in the ticking rates of clocks. Time seems to us to be absolute, with all identical clocks ticking at the same rate. But sensitive instruments and the giant particle accelerators that can boost particles up to near thespeed of light have confirmed Einstein’s relativity. It is a fact of the world, not just an imaginative and radical theory.
This last point indicates a profound difference between Relativity and Cubism — in fact, a profound difference between science and art in general. Today, more than a century later, painters and other artists can choose whether or not to include Cubist elements in their work. 
Undoubtedly, Cubism has had a lasting influence on art. But artists today are not bound to it in expressing their particular visions and creations.
By contrast, physicists are obligated to adhere to Einstein’s equations in all they do, whether inventing new theories or working with existing theories. The reason? Einstein’s theory has been shown by experiment to represent the actual behavior of the physical world. The province of science is the physical world, and experiments on that world can reveal its properties. Art is not necessarily connected to the physical world. There is nothing in the world of art that tests its validity or falsity in the manner of the needle of a voltmeter registering the amount of current surging through an electrical circuit.
One might say that even though the enterprise of science is a human activity, the ultimate subject matter of science lies outside of the human mind. On the other hand, even though the arts might portray objects in the physical world, the ultimate arena in which art is appreciated and judged lies inside the human mind. That fact is why the notion of beauty varies from one human culture to another, and even from one person to another. On the wall of my living room is a painting by the Boston School painter Gary Hoffman, depicting a deer drinking water from a clear stream. My wife and I love the painting. Friends of ours find it sentimental and mundane. On the wall of their living room is an abstract painting of what, to my eyes, looks like a random collision of blobs of paint. Yet they consider it beautiful. No one can say who is right and who is wrong, or even whether rightness and wrongness are relevant.
I would argue that the power of art rests precisely in its different truths for different people, in its kaleidoscope of impressions within the mind. Each person brings to a work of art their individual aesthetic sensibilities and life experiences. In effect, each person is a co-creator of the work of art. A novel is not completed until it is read by a reader, and each reader completes the novel in a different way. There is something intimate about such an experience.
Science has a different power. It is the power to explore the world outside of ourselves. It is a power that, by that exploration and the commitment to finding truth in the external world, leads to the invention of antibiotics and computers and photographs of Earth seen from outer space.
One last rumination. The inner world of the mind, which I have suggested is the province of the arts, is so compelling, so unique, that various philosophers and even philosophers of science have argued that an external world does not exist at all. After all, everything we know about the “external world” must pass through our own perceptions, our own consciousness. How can we be sure that we not inventing that external reality altogether? In this view, all that we know for certainty is that we have thoughts and minds, the starting point of Descartes’ reflections. We cannot be sure that anything exists beyond our minds. This philosophical idea is called Solopsism. One of the leading advocates of this viewpoint was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753). If the idea of the solopsists is true, then there are not two dominions: the inner world and the outer world. There is only one, the inner world. In which case, the sharp distinction between science and art I have drawn would be false.
A related but less extreme version of Solopsism in modern times is the work of contemporary philosopher of science Andrew Pickering and others who argue that because science is a social enterprise, many of the notions of science, such as the existence of fundamental particles called quarks, are human constructions, perhaps even purely mathematical objects, not to be found in nature. This school in the philosophy of science would argue that we really have little idea of what actually exists in nature.
Another related idea has emerged from the strange fact that the behavior of physical systems at the very tiny size of atoms and smaller depends on whether we make an observation of such systems. In the famous “double slit” experiment, electrons and photons behave one way when we are examining them and a different way when we are not. Such results diminish a clear separation between the inner and outer world. An extreme version of these notions is the “Observership Hypothesis,” promoted most notably by the late physicist John Archibald Wheeler. 
Motivated by the strange behavior of quantum physics, Wheeler argued that external reality, including the universe as a whole, comes into existence only when it is “observed.” An observation requires an “observer,” which requires a mind, or something equivalent to a mind.
As the great physicist Richard Feynman said, no one understands quantum physics (even though we have derived quantum equations that make very accurate predictions). So, I will not get into a philosophical tangle about the role of the observer in quantum physics. However, I strongly disagree with the notion that an external world does not exist outside of the human mind, that everything we know in science is a human construction. If this view were true, then there would be no surprises in science. Yet, we are constantly surprised to discover phenomena that either were not predicted or that, in fact, clashed with predictions. One paramount example of such a surprise is the discovery that light can travel through a vacuum. When it was discovered in the nineteenth century that light was a wave of electrical and magnetic energy, scientists reasoned that light, like for sound and other waves, would require a material medium to transmit it. If you talk in a vacuum, no one can hear you. Sound waves require molecules of air or another material medium to transmit them. The material medium proposed to transmit light was called the “ether.” In the late nineteenth century, the American physicist Albert Michelson and colleagues did a number of experiments to measure the movement of the earth through the ether. When they couldn’t detect the ether, they were so certain that they must be making a mistake that they repeated their experiment. Still, no ether. Eventually, Einstein came up with his theory of relativity, which began with the assumption that the ether did not exist, eventually requiring a new conception of time and space.
Apologies to some of you for this last rumination, which may seem a bit distant from where I began. Once one begins ruminating, like pulling a loose thread from a jacket one doesn’t know when the end will come.
But back to our main subject. However we eventually understand the curious role of the observer in quantum physics, I believe that a physical world exists outside of our minds. We are not imagining everything “out there.” Thus, science has its own territory, just as art has its own. I am constantly amazed that we human beings are capable of both science and art, that we are skillful explorers of both the inner world of our minds and the outer world beyond our minds. We are both experiencers and experimenters.