The Year of Exploration

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

It’s a rare and ever so wonderful experience to arrive at conclusions and discover resources (in this case - papers, articles, talks) that not only just align with said conclusions, but also present them with evidence, reasoning, further insights - à la extended brainstorming. One such instance for me these past few months centred on experimentation, the intersection of art and science, and musings on why Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing felt so inherently scientific - to me, the rhythm of thought and interior are just much more intriguing than traditional plot structures. This idea somehow found its way into my application, and fast forward to my Oxford interview, I was rambling about how exciting it would be to explore, analyse - and perhaps even enhance - these nonlinear free forms using the very computational methods we have now (i.e sentiment analysis). I initially thought it was peculiar and overtly niche to draw such parallels, but I was wrong. There is far more depth to this than I had imagined.

My somewhat romantic starting point was that science represents the tangible, art embodies the intangible, yet their ultimate purpose is the same: to dissect, explore, understand, and express the essence of the human experience - each through their distinct methods. I thoroughly enjoyed entertaining this, and then I stumbled upon an incredible essay on Aeon titled “Laboratories of the Impossible - how the novel became a laboratory for experimental physics”.

We were learning to be the authors of experiments, not just the readers. But even the simplest plots of physics were so bizarre that they were too difficult to recount in words. We learned that, to extract any sense from matter, we had to contrive intricate machines and derive byzantine equations.

Scientists still enumerate a method that has anywhere from three to a dozen steps. Some philosophers generalise experiments further as ‘interventions’: each is a connection between some instrument and an object, visible or not, that humans wish to understand. In their accounting, an experiment is the intermediary between the physical world and human minds. It is the handmaiden to perceptions. At best, it is a programme for discovering ourselves and the impersonal world.

During the 1980s, Gerald Prince, an eminent professor of French literature, did try to define ‘experimental fiction’. The words for ‘experiment’ in each of the Romance languages remain synonyms for the term’s original sense: an experience. But Prince immediately rejected this definition as too generic; surely every novelist wrote from experience. He also rejected the denotation, from Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, that an experiment is a test or a trial to demonstrate truth – experiments in fiction did more than put truth to the test. Prince even rejected the gimmicky literary experiments of postmodernism and the avant-garde, but he briefly entertained the notion that experiments in fiction could be like those in science. He thought especially of Émile Zola’s empiricism in The Experimental Novel (1880), and he weighed the rigorous work of Raymond Queneau and other writers and mathematicians who were members of the literary collective Oulipo. These authors, at least, adhered to some method, or ‘recipe’ as Prince called it.

But Prince eventually enumerated just three traits common to literary experiments. They pique through form or structure rather than plot. Their concerns are interior to the text, not exterior. They tease or twist language systematically. They are, in other words, self-referential, even recursive. In sum, they are exercises in manipulation and control.

C.P. Snow would be in awe - probably less than I was, but let’s not keep score. The realisation that the niche intersection of literature and physics is not just alive but thriving is groundbreaking to me. Language itself is empirical data. Both fields ultimately deal with complex systems that defy straightforward, linear explanation and require innovative methods to describe or understand. They want to capture the fluid and multifaceted nature of experiences. Both emphasise the unfiltered, direct observation as a fundamental process and require a willingness to experiment with new tools, methods and forms to explore uncharted territory. Both acknowledge the influence of perspective in shaping outcomes. Both challenge linear, traditional models of understanding. Both rely on imaginative processes and intuition to explore and explain their respective domains - only their mediums differ. Time itself is a narrative construct that is so often manipulated in literature to deepen our understanding of existence (To the Lighthouse is an excellent demonstration of this). Stream of consciousness narratives almost always challenge the conventional flow of time. Time becomes a literary device. Physics similarly questions the linear progression of time. Time might be more flexible than it seems, they both suggest.

What we fail to realise is that literature has a far greater predictive power than we might assume - think H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. You might very well think that it primarily just explores the ethical implications of technological progress, but its scope actually extends far beyond.

Proust Was A Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer provided an excellent ground for research into this topic - it is an absolute treasure of a book and the preface written by the author is brilliant.

“Whitman was busy studying brain anatomy textbooks and watching gruesome surgeries, George Eliot was reading Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell, Stein was conducting psychology experiments in William James's lab, and Woolf was learning about the biology of mental illness. It is impossible to understand their art without taking into account its relationship to science.”

“We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cézanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions.”

Whitman was revolutionary with his idea that the body and soul are inseparable - we do not have a body, we are a body, he thought. He was once called a “remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Hazard”. Perhaps he would not be surprised that modern neuroscience confirmed his idea - emotions are generated by the body.

The book explores the stories of many brilliant thinkers who anticipated scientific phenomena ahead of their time (highly recommend reading it). However, I was fascinated to find Stravinsky among them - as a hobbyist classical pianist (meaning I have been playing for nearly six years and still can’t play) and a long-time fan of Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes, and Igor Stravinsky himself, I was intrigued to see his invention interpreted through a scientific lens.

“Once the screaming began, there was no stopping it. After being pummeled by the "Augurs" chord, the bourgeoisie began brawling in the aisles. Old ladies attacked young aesthetes. Insults were hurled at ballerinas. The riot got so loud that Monteux could no longer hear what he was conducting. The orchestra disintegrated into a cacophony of confused instruments. Musical dissonance was usurped by real dissonance. The melee incensed Stravinsky. His art was being destroyed by an idiotic public. His face etched with anger, Stravinsky fled from his seat and ran backstage. In the wings was Diaghilev, frantically switching the houselights on and off, on and off. The strobe effect only added to the madness.”

“An instinctive modernist, he realised that our sense of prettiness is malleable, and that the harmonies we worship and the tonic chords we trust are not sacred. Nothing is sacred. Nature is noise. Music is nothing but a sliver of sound that we have learned how to hear. With The Rite, Stravinsky announced that it was time to learn something new. This faith in our mind's plasticity—our ability to adapt to new kinds of music—was Stravinsky's enduring insight. He knew the brain would eventually right his wrongness. The audience would adapt to his difficult notes and discover the beauty locked inside his art. As neuroscience now knows, our sense of sound is a work in progress. Neurons in the auditory cortex are constantly being altered by the songs and symphonies we listen to. Nothing is difficult forever.”

This fresh perspective on the symbiosis between art and science made me reflect on several things - most notably on the idea that experimentation is the truest form of freedom. No rigid frameworks, no conventions, no fear of failure. I fully recognise that many might view these modern experiments as peculiar, elitist or unattainable - respectfully, I disagree. You might believe that rambling without a plot, experimenting with the abstract, challenging traditional forms, structures and narratives is futile - I ask you to reconsider.

I see breaking free from archaic traditions - be they literary, scientific, or musical - and exploring, twisting, experimenting as the very antithesis of inaccessibility. True accessibility is in the courage to challenge and invite others to experience the unfamiliar. When we experiment, we democratise possibility. It is an act of profound generosity. To dismiss experimentation is to deny ourselves the very essence of progress - the key is not exclusivity, but universality. The constant demand for immediate answers and results is a symptom of our overstimulated lives and the 200-character tweets that we’ve grown so accustomed to. Everything must be practical, efficient, straightforward - and here we are with our dimmed, overstretched minds.

Resist the above and begin 2025 with something monumental, something that initially feels tedious. Sit through a five-hour Wagner opera. Savour the moment. Push through the exhaustion to reach a euphoric state where the experience transforms into a high. Follow the rules, and then rewrite them.

Happy New Year!