What is the common ground between art and science? And how is Beethoven like Darwin?

Novelist Ian McEwan and theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed met at the Science Museum in London to mark the opening of the Large Hadron Collider exhibition. This is an edited extract of their conversation. Go to the article


"There is an obsessive element to it which should be familiar to the artist – to many people in society. And it's driven by the pursuit of something much, much bigger than ourselves and the little trivial concerns of everyday life." NA-H

"I would like to feel that we could think about science as just one more aspect of organised human curiosity rather than as a special compartment. And it has, as has been very clear from this discussion, a powerful aesthetic. I think we need to generalise it. We need to absorb it into our sense that we can love the music of Beethoven without being composers and we could love science as a celebration of human ingenuity without being scientists." IM

Nima Arkani-Hamed, Martha Kearney and Ian McEwan at London's Science Museum Photograph: Jennie Hills/Science Museum



"This is one of the wonderful things about fundamental physics. The essential ideas are simple. The possible answers to essential open questions are more complicated but the essential issues are deep and they're simple to state. And with some patience it's possible to address them head on and get a sense for what's going on without all the details of the mathematics. But it requires a very engaged audience and it can't be done casually." NA-H

Nima Arkani-Hamed, Martha Kearney and Ian McEwan at London's Science Museum Photograph: Jennie Hills/Science Museum

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/17/art-science-ian-mcewan-nima-arkani-hamed