Where Art and Science Meet: <em>Maria Popova’s Traversal</em>

There are no exploration points more vital to our present moment than the intersections between art and science. Though such a statement sounds lofty, it couldn’t be more grounded and relevant. This space, or, as Maria Popova puts it in her new masterwork Traversal, “the Venn diagram of the humanistic and scientific,” is where we most effectively learn the nuanced distinctions between fact and opinion, between correlation and causation, and between care and expediency. The future of a better world depends on such a hybrid education, and there is no more dedicated advocate than Popova, who has based her entire career around extolling its virtues historically, personally, and passionately.

Traversal, like her previous books Figuring and The Universe in Verse, is a complex feat of scholarship and artistry, a book that doesn’t hand-hold its readers through a clearly marked path but rather winds its way through the vicissitudes of existence via a disparate group of circuitous avenues. Popova tells the stories of Mary and Percy Shelley’s tumultuous romance and the birth of Frankenstein interweaved with Walt Whitman’s poetic journey, the discovery of synthetic pigments of blue, the travels and travails of Captain Cook, the transit of Venus in 1761, the eruption of Mt. Tambora that caused a “Year Without a Summer,” Alfred Wegener’s development of continental drift, the invention of the bicycle, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s breakthroughs in X-ray crystallography, among numerous others. The myriad connections between these narratives—both literal and figurative—emerge methodically as the pages progress, though Popova smartly orients the reader occasionally with temporal relativity. When she introduces the British polymath Humphry Davy, for instance, she notes that he was “born weeks before James Cook’s death,” an efficient means of keeping the many narratives cohabitant. This also reiterates part of Popova’s overall argument, which is the emphasis of causality in human history.

Because these stories not only demonstrate the caprices of life’s intersections but also the bewildering number of such intersections that exist. Here’s an example. When Mt. Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, erupted in 1815 and took “an estimated ninety thousand lives” in its small island nation alone, it also sent fifty-five million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which created “a thin film of ash” covering the entire planet. This is why 1816 is referred to as “the Year Without a Summer,” as the temperature dropped, crops failed, and the seasons “came unbolted.” The rare and devastating weather fluctuation of that year was partly what inspired Karl von Drais to invent the bicycle, as he believed it could replace horses, who depended on the same failing crops as people. And the bicycle was what allowed Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin to complete her degree at Oxford, which allowed her to dedicate her life to “rehumanizing humanity,” as Popova puts it, including vital work on insulin and nuclear disarmament. We even get a glimpse of Popova herself on two wheels, placing the personal within the scope of the grandly historical. These disparate threads are not relayed chronologically but rather in a structure as complex as the crystals Hodgkin studied.

These interconnections Popova carefully unfurls are more than mere examples of historical causality. What drives Popova to explore these specific instances is way they are informed by both science and literature, facts and fancy, truth and art. Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein wonderfully exemplifies this hybridity—both in terms of the insights into existence Shelley was able to convey because of her passion for both subjects and in terms of Victor Frankenstein’s creature, a literally pieced-together entity. Each of Popova’s protagonists in Traversal derive similar inspiration from one field to incorporate into the other. In timeless lines from Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman evokes scientific ideas to express global and eternal unity: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Dorothy Hodgkin’s love of poetry and mosaics, conversely, informed her revolutionary work in chemistry and molecular biology—but, and this is Popova’s point, it brought Hodgkin to the same conclusions and instilled in her the same passion as Whitman. “It matters,” Popova writes, that Hodgkin “had a passion for ancient history and that she marched for ideals that would tesselate a more livable future. It mattered to her spirit, and it mattered to her body of work.”

Because science, despite its ostensible objectivity, “is not impervious to the terrors of power,” it cannot be the last word on the way of things. “We feel first and think second,” Popova writes, “then spend our lives contorting to invert the order, sublimating emotion to reason, only to find ourselves made smaller and less alive from the flight from feeling.”

Human life is meaningless without art, creativity, individual expression—we need to externalize our interiority or else we decay. But we are similarly bereft if we didn’t have the roving curiosity of science to move us practically forward. These are two requisite components of our existence. They are not discordant but rather commingled elements—the history of art and the history of science are inarguably correlated. It’s easy to forget that seemingly simple objects—a brush, a pencil, even language—are tools of scientific origin. Sometimes, scientific developments generate new art forms, like photography or CGI, while other times the relationship is inverted, as in the way, to borrow a point made by David Wooten in The Invention of Science, Renaissance artists’ discovery of perspective representation “led astronomers to take a new interest in measuring distances in order to establish exactly where certain objects—new stars—were in the heavens.”

If civilization as a whole benefits greatly from the fields of rigor and imagination, it also elevates the life and mind of individuals. Maria Popova makes this argument again and again in Traversal, though in deftly indirect way. She quotes novelist Ursula K. La Guin: “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.”

Again, this is not some hifalutin abstraction—this is the future of our species, our planet, our existence. We can no longer compartmentalize art and science into two separate realms, as if they were discrete forms made for opposing purposes rather than tools assisting the same venture.

Traversal is one of those rare books that is itself a paragon of that which it extols. Popova celebrates what she describes: The achievements of figures whose insatiable indigestion of science and art made them better thinkers, better artists, better people. She also embodies it. Reading books like Traversal and writers like Maria Popova can do the same for us.