The philosopher Roland Barthes wrote somewhere that “whereas for literature language constitutes its own world, for science it is only a simple instrument.” This is easily explained, since the only language that science needs is that of mathematics, since there are not enough words to describe the whole of reality.
Without going any further, when Heisenberg, founder of quantum mechanics and a Christian believer, was dying, his last words were to ask God the reason for relativity and the reason for turbulence. To do this, Heisenberg had the mathematical formulas memorized for life, knowing that God could only respond with other similar formulas. This is what the people who accompanied him in his agony tell us. In case there were any doubts, there is a published study that deals with the relationships between language, science, art and philosophy. It is signed by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and is entitled: What is philosophy? (Anagrama).
In this look at philosophy as a discipline linked to art and science, Deleuze and Guattari teach us that philosophy is the art of creating “concepts,” science is the art of constructing “functions,” and literature is the art of originating “perceptions and affects.” Hence, the novelist is an inventor of “unknown or poorly understood” affects.
Following the pattern of Deleuze and Guattari, we have three planes that are the three ways that the brain has of coinciding with chaos and facing it. It is here where the mathematical formulas that express these ideas come into play and that are the closest thing to differential equations that describe the movement of a fluid in a simplified model of atmospheric convection. Starting from the instability and the differences between the different planes, Deleuze and Guattari manage to present us with the mechanism of creation, both of concepts and functions, as well as of perceptions and affects in the case of art.
To sum up, and returning to Barthes, we must remember that, according to him, literature enjoyed the attributes and contents of science, since all scientific material has been treated by universal literature; what science and literature have in common are words, he said. However, as we pointed out at the beginning, words are an instrument for science, they do not in any way constitute its reality, which would be constituted by numbers. Then there is the other thing, that is, scientific truth supported by the religious interpretation of the world, as Heisenberg believed.
Carried away by abstract concepts, it is possible to imagine Heisenberg about to die, raising serious doubts between the different planes to which Deleuze and Guattari allude in their book, with the strange sensation of listening to someone speaking his own language without understanding what he is saying, because the only thing Heisenberg hopes for at that moment is to define himself at any point in space until he concretizes his new form.
The stone axe It is a section where Montero Glezwith a prose-like will, exercises its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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