Barbara at work, Photo: Marianne Barcellona

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Science brims with colorful personalities, but the most important thing about a scientific result is not the scientist who found it, but the result itself.  Because that result is universal.  In a sense, that result already exists.  It is only found by the scientist.  For me, this impersonal, disembodied character of science is both its great strength and its great weakness.

I couldn’t help comparing the situation to my other passion, the arts.  In the arts, the individual is the essence.  Individual expression is everything.  You can separate Einstein from the equations of relativity, but you cannot separate Beethoven from the Moonlight Sonata.  No one will ever write The Tempest except Shakespeare or The Trial except Kafka.      

Alan Lightman in A Sense of the Mysterious:  Science and the Human Spirit

Comments are welcome!