Rachel: Alright Justine, pop quiz. When I say "theoretical physicist," what's the first word that pops into your head? Justine: Oh, easy. "Spreadsheet." Maybe "calculator." Definitely not "poet." Rachel: Exactly! And that's the stereotype we're going to demolish today. It’s this idea that science is all cold, hard logic, while art gets to have all the fun with imagination and creativity. Justine: Right, like one is done in a sterile lab with beakers and the other in a messy, paint-splattered studio. We see them as total opposites. Rachel: But what if that entire division is a myth? What if the creative process for a scientist discovering a new law of nature is almost identical to a painter creating a masterpiece? Justine: Okay, now you have my attention. That feels like a pretty radical claim. Rachel: It is! And it’s the central argument of the book we’re diving into today: The Poetry and Music of Science by Tom McLeish. Justine: And get this—McLeish wasn't just a world-class physicist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also an Anglican lay reader who was deeply into medieval history. Rachel: Right! He was someone who lived and breathed both worlds, which is why his argument feels so authentic. He’s not just an outsider looking in; he’s telling us what it’s really like on the inside of a scientific mind. And his whole argument starts with a simple conversation he had that completely changed his perspective.

Justine: A single conversation? What happened? Rachel: So, McLeish was at the University of Leeds, and he strikes up a conversation with a colleague from the fine art department, a painter named Ken Hay. They start talking about their work, about what it feels like to create something new. Justine: I'm picturing a very awkward chat. "So... you mix colors. I... solve differential equations." Rachel: That's what you'd expect! But it went somewhere completely different. The artist, Ken Hay, starts describing his process. He talks about having this original idea in his head, this concept for a painting. But then he confronts the reality of his materials—the paint, the canvas. The idea never quite translates perfectly. He has to experiment, he gets frustrated, the material pushes back, and he’s forced to reformulate his original concept over and over again. Justine: Oh, I know that feeling. Anyone who’s ever tried to bake a cake from a recipe picture knows that feeling. The reality never matches the vision. Rachel: Exactly. And as the artist is describing this cycle—of excitement, hope, frustration, disappointment, and then a rekindling of hope—McLeish has this profound realization. He realizes he could describe his own scientific research in almost precisely the same terms. Justine: Wait, so the scientist and the artist were basically describing the same job? I always pictured lab coats and spreadsheets, not emotional rollercoasters. Rachel: That’s the illusion! McLeish realized that his own work—developing new theories in physics—followed the exact same emotional and intellectual path. He’d have an imaginative idea, a new hypothesis. But then he’d have to confront the constraints of mathematics or the results of an experiment. The data would "push back" just like paint on a canvas. His beautiful idea would fall short, and he’d have to go back, reformulate, and try again. Justine: That completely reframes what a scientist does. It’s not a linear march toward truth. It’s a messy, creative, frustrating dance. Rachel: It’s a dance between imagination and constraint. And that’s the shared territory. The book argues that this is where true creativity lives, in both fields. It’s not about pure, untethered imagination for the artist, and it’s not about pure, rigid logic for the scientist. Both are wrestling with an idea and trying to give it form within a set of rules. Justine: It reminds me of that old quote from the poet Wordsworth, where he contrasted the lonely scientist with the poet who "sings a song in which all human beings join." He made science sound so isolated and inaccessible. Rachel: McLeish tackles that head-on. He calls it the "ladder of access." For art, there's a smooth ladder. You can be the artist, a critic, a student, or just someone who enjoys a painting in a museum. There are many levels of engagement. But for science, that ladder is broken. You're either a professional scientist or you're on the outside, looking at a wall of jargon. Justine: And that’s a huge problem. Because if we can’t access it, we can’t feel it. We can’t have that emotional connection. I remember as a kid, I finally understood how moon phases worked—not just memorizing them, but truly seeing the 3D model in my head of the sun, Earth, and moon. The book mentions a similar story. And that moment was pure joy. It was an aesthetic experience. Rachel: Yes! That’s what McLeish is saying. That "aha!" moment of understanding is an emotional, beautiful experience, just like appreciating art. His goal is to rebuild that ladder of access, to show us that the "impassioned expression" Wordsworth saw in poetry is also, as he put it, "in the countenance of all Science." We just have to be taught how to see it. Justine: Okay, so if it's not just logic, what is driving these scientific breakthroughs? It can't all be happy accidents.

Rachel: Well, this leads to the second big idea, which is about the unseen engine of discovery: visual imagination. McLeish, being a physicist who studies "soft matter"—things like polymers, gels, goopy stuff—gives this incredible example from his own field. Justine: I’m ready. I feel like "soft matter" is a field I can intuitively understand. It’s squishy. Rachel: Exactly. So, scientists were trying to understand how long, stringy molecules called polymers move when they're all tangled together in a melted plastic. Think of a huge bowl of spaghetti. How does one noodle move through the mess? It’s a massively complex problem. Justine: Right, because it’s bumping into all the other noodles. It’s trapped. Rachel: Precisely. For years, the math was just intractable. Then, in the 1970s, a French physicist named Pierre-Gilles de Gennes had a breakthrough. But it wasn't a new equation. It was a picture. He imagined a single polymer chain not as a complex noodle, but as a snake slithering through a narrow tunnel formed by its neighbors. He even coined a name for it: "reptation," from the same root as reptile. Justine: A snake in a tube! That’s brilliant. You can instantly see it. It simplifies the whole chaotic mess into one clear, moving image. Rachel: It was a game-changer. It gave physicists a mental model to work with. But then the problem got even harder. They started studying "star polymers," which aren't long chains but have multiple arms radiating from a central point. Justine: Okay, so the snake-in-a-tube idea doesn't work for that. A star-shaped thing can't slither. Rachel: It can't! And this is where the visual imagination gets even more creative. The scientists came up with a new analogy. They said a star polymer moving through a tangled mesh is like an octopus in a fishing net. Justine: An octopus in a fishing net! I will never forget that. That is such a perfect, slightly panicked image. It has to pull one arm out, then another, and kind of shuffle its way through. Rachel: That's exactly the physics of it! The analogy is the insight. It captures the slow, frustrating process of the arms retracting and re-engaging. This kind of visual, imaginative leap is at the heart of so many scientific discoveries. It’s not just a fun teaching tool; it’s the tool of creation itself. Justine: Is this kind of visual thinking common, or was this just a one-off for goopy plastics? Rachel: It’s everywhere. McLeish brings up the ultimate example: Einstein. Einstein himself said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." His breakthrough with special relativity came from a thought experiment—a visual story he told himself. He asked, "What would I see if I could ride alongside a beam of light?" Justine: I’ve heard that before, but I never really thought about what it means. He’s not doing math; he’s daydreaming. Rachel: He's creating a movie in his head! And when he "watched" that movie, he saw a contradiction, a paradox that couldn't exist according to the known laws of physics. The visually imagined story revealed the flaw in the old knowledge. The solution to that paradox was the theory of relativity. The story came first. Justine: Wow. So the initial spark, the thing that even poses the right question, is an act of imagination. The "scientific method" of testing and proving comes later. Rachel: Exactly. As Einstein also said, "The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution." And that formulation is a creative act. It’s about seeing the world in a new way, whether it’s as an octopus in a net or from the back of a light beam. Rachel: And this imaginative leap isn't just a cold, intellectual exercise. McLeish argues it's often driven by something much more primal: emotion.

Justine: Okay, this is the part that feels most counter-intuitive to me. Science is supposed to be objective, rational, detached. Bringing emotion into it feels... messy. Unscientific, even. Rachel: That’s the modern view, but McLeish argues it’s a recent and damaging one. He says that if you look at the personal accounts of scientists, their work is saturated with emotion. He quotes Einstein again, who described his ten-year search for general relativity as years of "anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing." Those are powerful, emotional words. Justine: "Intense longing." You don't see that in a textbook. You see the final, clean equation, not the decade of emotional turmoil it took to get there. Rachel: Right. The final product is scrubbed clean of the human story. But McLeish argues that story, and the emotions that fuel it, are essential. And he gives one of the most powerful modern examples I've ever heard, a story about a chemical engineer at Caltech named Julie Kornfield. Justine: Okay, I'm ready. Rachel: The story starts with a tragedy: the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, where two 747s collided on a runway. It was the deadliest aviation accident in history, and a huge part of the devastation was the post-crash fire from the jet fuel, which atomized into a massive, explosive mist. For decades, scientists tried to create a safer fuel that wouldn't do this, but they failed. Justine: That’s a heavy place to start. So there’s this huge, unsolved problem. Rachel: Yes. And then, after the 9/11 attacks, a senior colleague at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, haunted by the images of the fireballs, went to Julie Kornfield and said, "We have to solve this. We have to renew the search for a safe fuel." The motivation was purely emotional, born from a response to human disaster. Justine: That's incredible. It completely reframes 'doing science' from a job to a mission. Rachel: It became a mission. Kornfield’s team spent the next decade working on it. Their idea was to add a tiny amount of a special long-chain polymer to the fuel. In normal flight, the fuel would behave normally. But in a high-speed impact, these polymers would stretch out and hold the fuel together, preventing it from forming that deadly mist. Justine: It’s like adding microscopic rubber bands to the liquid. Rachel: A perfect analogy. But the challenges were immense. They struggled for years. The students on the project were driven by this vision, this desire to prevent future tragedies. They worked tirelessly, combining theory and experiment. Finally, after more than a decade of work, they had a formula that worked. They set up a test where they fired a bullet into a container of regular jet fuel and one with their polymer-enhanced fuel. Justine: I can’t even imagine how tense that moment must have been. Rachel: The video is astonishing. The regular fuel explodes in a massive fireball. The fuel with their polymer additive just... sloshes. It rips open, but there's no mist, no explosion. They had done it. Justine: Wow. That gives me chills. To see a decade of work, fueled by this deep human desire to help, pay off in such a dramatic way. Rachel: And that’s the core of McLeish’s final point. Science isn't devoid of emotion. It is often propelled by it. Desire, longing, grief, joy, awe—these aren't distractions from the work; they are the very things that give it meaning and purpose. Picasso’s famous painting Guernica was a direct, emotional response to the horror of a bombing. Kornfield's fuel was the same. Both are creative acts born from a deep emotional response to the world.

Justine: So when you put it all together—the shared struggle of the artist and the scientist, the imaginative leap of the octopus in the net, and the emotional drive behind the fire-safe fuel—it paints a very different picture of science. Rachel: It’s a much more human picture. McLeish’s ultimate point is that we’ve created this false hierarchy. We’ve put "objective" science at the top and "subjective" art somewhere else, as if one is about finding truth and the other is about expressing feelings. But he’s saying that’s a false choice. Justine: They’re both about the human experience of engaging with the world. Rachel: Exactly. They are both fundamentally human activities, ways of making meaning, not just finding facts. They are a response to the world driven by wonder, imagination, and even love. The book is really a call to see science not as a sterile body of knowledge, but as one of the great, creative, and poetic stories of humanity. Justine: It makes you wonder how many other fields we've put into these neat little boxes. What are we missing by keeping them separate? The book got some criticism for being more of a beautiful, poetic argument than a rigorous philosophical one, but maybe that's the point. Maybe the way to bridge the gap is through stories, not just logic. Rachel: That's such a great question. And I think McLeish would agree. He’s not just telling us that science is creative; he’s showing us through these incredible stories. We'd love to hear from our listeners—are you a scientist who paints? An artist who codes? Tell us on our socials about the unexpected creative connections in your own life. Justine: I love that. Let’s dissolve some of those boundaries. Rachel: Let's do it. Justine: This is Aibrary, signing off.