Vermeer, Narnia, Moai and other Mysteries

My brother-in-law had recommended an excellent independent film titled The Lunch Box. My wife borrowed the DVD from the local library, and it is a charming movie. However, what caught our eye in the previews was a documentary of sorts called Tim’s Vermeer. We borrowed the DVD (thanks again, local library!) and watched it this weekend. I was blown away!

The 80-minute documentary is about engineer-inventor and art-enthusiast Tim Jenison who becomes intrigued by Vermeer’s paintings. Having had a previous career in what he calls video production, he notices something uncanny about the Vermeer works – almost as if they were painted from looking through a camera lens. This sets him on a five-year journey to figure out if Vermeer could have used an optical set up with lenses and mirrors to essentially paint pictures in a mechanical, almost robotic, approach. The chasm between the arts and the STEM fields we perceive today would not have bothered Vermeer. He was creating fine experimental art aided by the mechanical arts!

I’m not going to delve into the details of the show since you should watch it for yourself. Suffice to say that Tim Jenison, a non-painter in every sense, decides that the best way to test his theory is to replicate the conditions and “paint a Vermeer”. He chooses The Music Lesson (shown below from the Wikipedia page) as his test masterpiece. Interestingly, the original is not easily accessible and hangs in Buckingham Palace and therefore Tim makes an attempt to ask the Queen of England for access. Okay, that’s enough of my teaser for the show. What struck me most is that Tim’s curiosity and background exemplifies why one should have a liberal arts education. I don’t know if Tim himself had one, but his project brings together science, engineering, the fine arts, history, foreign language (Tim learned Dutch), computer technology, not to mention a huge dose of grit. Not being a painter, Tim has to spend a rather long time robotically painting the Vermeer.

At the end of the documentary, as Tim considers his quest and what he has learned, he correctly (in my opinion) states that we don’t actually know if Vermeer used a contraption similar to the one he designed. But his approach is at least plausible, and there are strong arguments one could make that Vermeer may have used a similar or related approach. There are no letters or other evidence that indicates what Vermeer actually did (although Tim makes an effort to hunt down as much information as he can, talking to experts in the field). That’s the thing about these historical mysteries. As researchers we try to come up with as plausible an explanation as possible. I think Tim is very successful in this regard.

Watching Tim’s Vermeer reminded me of some recent experiences I’ve had in encountering similar multi-disciplinary approaches to solve historical mysteries. Friends recommended Planet Narnia wherein Michael Ward constructs an argument of what ties the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia together. The original author C.S. Lewis never disclosed if there were over-arching connections leading to much speculation as to whether there was a hidden theological piece. I had read the Chronicles as a child but found them much less interesting than Tolkien’s works on Middle Earth. Tolkien’s world seemed much more immersive than Narnia and some of the theological analogies in several of the Chronicles seemed too overt. It turns out that a theologian discovered what might be the plausible key – but instead of being theological, it was alchemical – to the joy of this chemist! Reading Ward’s synthesis that uses literature, history, philosophy, alchemy, astronomy has given me much more respect for the Chronicles. Lewis had taken his secret to his grave so to speak, and we don’t know if Ward’s thesis is correct, but it seems very plausible (in my opinion as layman of literature). I also had a chance to meet Michael Ward, attend his seminar, and ask him some questions, while he was on his book tour in the U.S. That was roughly 7-8 years ago.

Then three years ago I came across another fantastic book written by two archaeologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. The Statues That Walked investigates and overturns the dominant Collapse narrative provided by Jared Diamond on the deforestation and barren mystery of Easter Island. Their research is carried out carefully, and I find their arguments plausible and compelling – stronger than Diamond’s thesis. Those strange statue heads are called Moai. While there have been many clever ideas as to how the statues were moved from the quarry, Lipo and Hunt provide the plausible suggestion that they were moved standing upright in a “walking” motion of sorts. As the director of a new living learning community cluster for students, I chose this book as a common theme. We invited Carl Lipo to give a seminar and hold discussions with students and faculty. In his seminar he showed us a video-clip of their attempt to “walk” the statue while filming with Nova (shortly before the Nova episode was released). The event was one of my highlights of the semester! Did the original inhabitants of Easter Island walk the statues as suggested by Hunt and Lipo? We don’t know for sure, but the research has yielded a very plausible suggestion both for the movement but also for the deforestation and eventual population depletion of the island. Like Jenison, the authors used a wide variety of areas spanning the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences to synthesize their argument.

For those of us who study the origin of life, we are not trying to answer the question of how exactly life began on Earth. We will never know at least in this lifetime (unless someone builds a time machine that allows us to observe it). The more modest question we are trying to answer is whether there is a plausible route from very simple chemicals (and our best guess of the environmental conditions) to the molecules commonly used in life today – in both its diversity and commonality. As a scientist trying to “solve” a complex historical problem, I’m reminded that insight can come from fields far and wide. There’s probably a good reason why “creation” stories are mythical in nature – where myth doesn’t mean something that is not true, but is rather a literary device to convey greater truth. I’d like to think that a many-angled liberal arts approach to the question of the origin of life that makes use of science, history, philosophy, art, theology, and more, will lead us to a deeper understanding of this mystery – one that leads to awe and wonder.