Greetings Philosophers:
Last night in New York the Tony award for the best play of the year went to
�Copenhagen� which recreates a meeting in 1941 between Niels Bohr and
Werner Heisenberg. The play opened originally in London at the Royal
National Theater in 1998 and came to Broadway last year. I haven�t seen the
play nor read the script, but from what I can gather from reviews in the New
York Times, �Copenhagen� parallels the discussion of the two protagonists in
Pirsig�s �Subjects, Objects, Data and Values.�
One reviewer wrote:
�In a wonderful speech in the second act, Bohr speaks of how 20th-century
physics restored man to the center of the universe, of how Albert Einstein
demonstrated that �measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with
universal impartiality� but a �human act� carried out from a specific point of
view in time and space.�
Compare this to Pirsig�s statement in SODV:
�The most striking similarity between the Metaphysics of Quality and
Complementarity is that this Quality event corresponds to what Bohr means
by �observation.� When the Copenhagen Interpretation �holds that the
unmeasured atom is not real, that its attributes are created or realized in the
act of measurement,� (Herbert xiii) it is saying something very close to the
Metaphysics of Quality. The observation creates the reality.�
Another NYT reviewer noted all the plays currently playing or in the wings
about science:
�Science and scientist have been onstage all over the places this season. Off
Broadway, Tina Landau�s �Space� presented astronomers on the lookout for
communication from the far reaches of the galaxy, and last week �Proof,�
David Auburn�s fine new play about the world of higher mathematics opened
at the Manhattan Theater Club. In the wings is a new musical also called
�Proof��I saw a staged reading by the York theater Company last
month�which is about Andrew Wiles, the Princeton professor who explained
one of mathematics� most famously lingering enigmas, Fermat�s Last
Theorem.
�In all these works, the pursuit of scientific knowledge looms as a search for
beauty and truth, which a number of these plays argue is precisely what
playwrights and other artists do.�
Compare this to Pirsig�s conclusion in SODV:
�Northrop's name for Dynamic Quality is "the undifferentiated aesthetic
continuum." By "continuum" he means that it goes on and on forever. By
"undifferentiated" he means that it is without conceptual distinctions. And by
"aesthetic" he means that it has quality.
�I think that science generally agrees that there is something that has to
enter into experiments other than the measuring instruments, and I think
science would agree that "Conceptually Unknown" is an acceptable name for
it. What science might not agree on is that this Conceptually unknown is
aesthetic. But if the Conceptually Unknown were not aesthetic why should
the scientific community be so attracted to it? If you think about it you will
see that science would lose all meaning without this attraction to the
unknown. A good word for the attraction is "curiosity." Without this curiosity
there would never have been any science. try to imagine a scientist who has
no curiosity whatsoever and estimate what his output will be.
�This aesthetic nature of the Conceptually Unknown is a point of connection
between the sciences and the arts. What relates science to the arts is that
science explores the Conceptually Unknown in order to develop a theory that
will cover measurable patterns emerging from the unknown. The arts explore
the Conceptually Unknown in other ways to create patterns such as music,
literature, painting, that reveal the Dynamic Quality that produced them. This
description, I think, is the rational connection between science and the arts.
�In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance art was defined as high
quality endeavor. I have never found a need to add anything to that definition.
But one of the reasons I have spent so much time in this paper describing
the personal relationship of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in the
development of quantum theory is that although the world views science as a
sort of plodding, logical methodical advancement of knowledge, what I saw
here were two artists in the throes of creative discovery. They were at the
cutting edge of knowledge plunging into the unknown trying to bring
something out of that unknown into a static form that would be of value to
everyone. As Bohr might have loved to observe, science and art are just two
different complementary ways of looking at the same thing. In the largest
sense it is really unnecessary to create a meeting of the arts and sciences
because in actual practice, at the most immediate level they have never
really been separated. They have always been different aspects of the same
human purpose.�
Isn�t it nice to see the rest of the world catching up to what Pirsig has been
saying all along? Aren�t we lucky to be riding on the cutting edge of a new,
enlightened metaphysics where the pursuit of beauty and truth, i. e., Quality,
is precisely what the greatest artists and scientists have done and continue
to do to this day? Wouldn�t it be wonderful if we could instill that pursuit into
every young person as his or her primary goal in life? I for one feel extremely
fortunate to have had the benefit of Pirsig�s light that a few playwrights and
some intelligentsia are just now beginning to see.
Platt
P.S. Thanks to Jeffrey Travis and Peter Lennox for their kind comments
about my last post, "The Good Life."
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