David Peat

106 From Certainty to Uncertaintygers in the carriages and no real fire in the firebox. A toy train incorporatessome of the elements of a real train while neglecting others.Likewise a scientific theory is a model of the real world, a model inwhich, for example, there is no friction, no air resistance, a model inwhich all surfaces are perfectly smooth and all motion is totally uniform.It refers to a world in which everything has been idealized. Thereis an old joke among physics teachers that to solve a particular problemyou must “take an elephant of negligible mass.” To a layperson thisis an absurdity but this is exactly the sort of approximation and simplificationthat is sometimes made in order to apply scientific theories.Of course corrections and additions can be made to any theory totake into account, for example, the elephant’s mass. But elegant theories,like beautifully built model trains and airplanes, are of necessitysimple. They say, “I am not the thing in itself but I point toward thatthing.” Likewise a Hindu or Tibetan painting says, “I am not a god. Iam not even a representation of a god (in the sense of a photograph ofa person). Rather I point toward something that lies beyond myself,and that which I point to may lead you to an experience of the god.”Such art always preserves the tension between what is and what isnot. Great art, such as that displayed in a Russian icon, is a frame orcontainer that holds this tension between two worlds and, in so doing,becomes charged with numinous power. By contrast, representationalart does not hold such a duality. It doesn’t say, “I am not the Death ofNelson but point toward an important historical event.” Rather it says,“I’m just like the Death of Nelson. If you had stood in that particularspot and at that particular moment in history this is more or less whatyou would have seen.” It says, “If you look at me you will give your eyethe actual experience of the surface and the texture of a bowl of fruit. Iam the exact image of the appearance of things in the world.”Yet in the end a painting remains a painting. Naturalistic and illusionisticpainting calls on us to enter into Coleridge’s “willing suspensionof disbelief.” Paintings ask us to collude with them and imaginethat we are looking at a scene through a window or standing on thedeck of Nelson’s H.M.S Victory. Indeed, in the nineteenth century somepainters produced vast panoramas that stretched around an entireroom so one was enveloped in the illusion of a great outdoor scene.