I couldn't resist this title.

I'm back in 1958, and the book is teaching me how to look up logarithms in the table in the back of the book. Please turn to page 568. Take the first two significant digits of the number you wish to find the logarithm for (common log, that is). Find that 2-digit number in the column to the left. Then look over the horizontal row to your number's right in the table to find the column under the third significant digit of your number. There will be a 3-digit number there, which must be preceded by the first digit which for space saving sake, has not been given but must be added from the column on the left. When you have a 4-digit number, that is the mantissa of your number. You have already found the characteristic of your number by calculating its log exponent in scientific notation. If your characteristic is negative (I know I'm often characterized as negative) then you must express your logarithm as the result of subtracting one positive number from another. Once you have determined this, you can put the characteristic and mantissa together and you have the common logarithm of your number.

But wait! This is 2004. Dazzling cities full of mile-high skyscrapers, joined with skywalks. Jet cars and flying bubbles take us where we want to go. Colonies on the Moon and even Mars. The "Science Police" make sure that we're all safe. War and poverty have been eliminated by wise social and genetic engineering. Everyone has perfect bodies and we're all wearing pink, aqua, and silver spandex jumpsuits with white boots! And logarithms? You just punch the numbers into your tiny hand-held calculator and out comes the answer, in a fraction of a second. Tom Slick! (as my old boss used to say when he was impressed.)

A New Kind of Art

I read a lot of scientists' blogs. I find them fascinating and I am so glad that science professionals take the time out of their busy lives to write these online journals. It gives me excellent insights into the lives and thought processes of folks I would never be able to talk to in person. The scientist bloggers talk about how they collaborate to write papers. And what it is like to teach classes in elementary physics when you are a high-level person trying to get your own research done. And they talk about their own specialty, what is going on there, what the controversies are, and what ideas are being offered as to how to resolve ongoing problems. Sometimes they even talk about the creative process of doing research, as the Australian physicist Michael Nielsen has been doing for the last week or so, in an inspiring set of essays about "Principles of Effective Research."

String theorists talk about their string stuff on their blogs, and it sounds, to me, like poetry in a foreign language. I can hear poetry recited in Russian, for instance, and know that it is poetry, even if I don't understand a word of it. But string theory, as everyone knows, is science. Well, it's supposed to be. Do I know this is science, even though I don't understand a word of it? Bosh! Science doesn't work that way! Just because it sounds like poetry to someone completely out of it, like me, doesn't mean a thing.

Lately, though, a note of self-doubt has been echoing in the blog writing of some of the string theorists. The lack of experimental verification has been getting to them. They desperately hope, perhaps against hope, that when the great supercollider at CERN goes online in 2007, something that confirms string theory, no matter how tenuous, will pop out of it. Meanwhile, they talk about how difficult it is to keep working on it, and how there are really no more places at the virtual table for any more scientists in the field, or at least how incredibly difficult it is to become a professional string theorist (or any other kind of physics theorist). Amanda Peet is a New Zealander who is now at the University of Toronto as a professor of theoretical physics and string theory. She was one of only two (count'em) two female scientists who appeared in the famous Brian Greene TV mini-series on string theory. She has a fascinating page on what it takes to become a professional physicist specializing in string theory. I can't help wondering, what would happen if a person tried to learn this stuff outside of a university career? Probably as impossible as trying to become a brain surgeon without going to graduate and medical school, I guess. Won't stop me from trying, though, since it wouldn't put anyone at risk.

The personnel picture, then, is small and esoteric for this kind of physics, and by its essential nature will remain that way. Yet curious outsiders like me can see into it, by way of the blog journals and websites. The more I see of this world, even if I can't (and may never) understand the substance of it, the more this subculture and its characters look familiar to me. They sound like artists. And this stuff sounds to me not like science, but like an art form. This is not a popular art form like comics or rock music. It's more like modern classical music, for instance twelve-tone and atonal music. Esoteric, demanding, relentlessly anti-popular, and accessible only to a few elite specialists. It's interesting that this musical system, dating from the early twentieth century, is highly mathematical, as if the originators wished to make music as "scientific" as possible.

It's possible that string theory will evolve, not into a science which describes "ultimate reality," but an art form that also aims at describing reality, but from another point of view. Unlike painting or simple music or writing, where anyone who wants to can at least play as an amateur, this mathematical physics art would be accessible only to people who would be willing to spend years learning it. It would probably exist only in universities, similar to that atonal modern music which found its only real home in academic music departments.

But as most classical music listeners (and even some composers) will tell you, twelve-tone music isn't what it used to be. Contemporary composers have moved on, even in the universities. It's been years since I've heard a recent twelve-tone or atonal piece, though I know there are still some die-hards writing and playing it and taking it very seriously. Will the same thing happen to string theory? There are fashions and trends in science, just as there are in music.

But there is an inescapable difference between art and science. Science demands proof, or at least experimental confirmation. Or, to put it in another way, it demands disproof, or falsification. An artwork can't be proved, disproved, or falsified. It can be judged as aesthetically good or bad, but there's no experiment or mathematical protocol out there that will tell you whether the art you see is good art or bad art. Statistics about how many people love a work of art are notoriously bad at measuring whether a work of art is really "great art."

Scientists sometimes attempt to prove their theories are right by the "elegance" or aesthetic value (at least mathematical-aesthetic) of their calculations and equations. Will this be the lasting legacy of string theory — though it was never proved that it had anything fundamental to say about the "real world," it created an art form which was arduous, difficult, serious, appreciated only by a few, and aesthetically beautiful?

Posted at 3:39 am | link