The seemingly unconnected worlds of quantum physics and art have been linked from early in the 20th century. Part exhibition catalogue, part discourse on this relationship, Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination, makes the case that imagination is critical for both practices, and both can learn from each other. The beautifully illustrated book is edited by Ariane Koek, the founder of the Arts at CERN programme and curator of the 2019 exhibition held at Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden, featuring works by 14 international artists inspired by particle physics. 

In her introduction, Koek uses the quantum entanglement metaphor to throw light on the link between physics and art, saying that “What is entangled in the process of both of these different ways of knowing and looking at the world, is crucially the imagination – that mysterious process by which we make unexpected links, out-of-the-box connections, and have inexplicable intuitions beyond the known world.” The book makes the case for the importance of interactions between art and physics via a series of essays by physicists and science communicators. It also includes a number of personal discourses between artists and physicists on gravity, time, space, light, matter and entropy.

Theoretical physicist and bestselling author Carlo Rovelli, from the Aix-Marseille University, provides a short overview of quantum entanglement. Predicted by Albert Einstein and collaborators in 1935, it describes the mysterious connection that exists between remote quantum systems, so that any change made to one instantly influences the other. It is still one of the hardest parts of quantum mechanics to understand in terms of the everyday world – or as Rovelli puts it, “How the hell do the two particles make their decisions consistent? Simple answer: we have no clue.”

However much data we have, they don’t provide us with new ideas for their interpretation – that takes imagination

Science writer Philip Ball follows this with a plea for the importance of imagination in physics, quoting Einstein in 1929, saying, “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Ball interprets this to mean “imagination precedes knowledge and establishes the precondition for it” and points out that however much data we may have from the Large Hadron Collider and other particle colliders, they don’t provide us with new ideas for their interpretation – that takes imagination. 

He suggests the current inability to explain dark matter, or why we haven’t been able to integrate supersymmetry into the Standard Model of particle physics, should be seen as a failure of imagination. Indeed, Ball writes that “the collective imagination of physicists has not yet made them vivid enough to be revealed or disproved”. He adds that efforts to provide a physical picture of quantum mechanics are placing more demands on physicists’ imaginations than ever before. Perhaps, he muses, inspiration may come from philosophy, art, literature or aesthetics “as imagination doesn’t recognize categories and boundaries”.

The entanglement of art and physics was, unsurprisingly, a feature of the surrealist art movement, beginning in 1917. Gavin Parkinson of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, provides a fascinating history of this relationship, which ultimately went sour. Key surrealists such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí became intrigued by relativity in the 1920s; while in 1943, painter Max Ernst made an explicit case for a philosophical link between surrealism and quantum theory – comparing the uncertainty of quantum phenomena to that of the role of the unconscious in surrealism. But after the war, anti-nuclear sentiment led to an intense critique of physics, and by 1958 the movement thought to “expose the physicists, empty the laboratories”. Only Dalí, who had himself become estranged from the other surrealists, stayed loyal to physics.

The final essay by Nicola Triscott, chief executive of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool, UK, expands on both the culture of physics and the contribution of artistic approaches to physics. Triscott argues that the discipline still represents itself as being without culture and value-free, but she presents numerous pieces of evidence to the contrary. For example, she looks at how ideas on gender and physics change geographically, with the perception of physics as “hard science” connected with maleness being prevalent in north-western Europe but not further south and east. Triscott also discusses the contribution artists can make to science, via numerous visiting-artist programmes, and through the adoption of ways of working that would be considered outside the traditional scientific method – for example, Mark Neyrinck at the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, who has used origami to study cosmic structures. 

The essay contributions are followed by what Koek describes as “diptychs” – short discourses from an artist and physicist pair who give personal reflections on a theme, providing contrasts and commonalities. These perspectives go a long way to show that imagination and intuition are “entangled in the process of scientific discovery, just as they are in the artistic process”.

Entangle ultimately urges us to keep examining the relationship between physics and the arts. Koek herself acknowledges that there is “no proof that these interactions have led to big discoveries – yet”, adding that “more work [is] needed to track impacts”. But she argues “the culture of physics as a whole is benefiting from interactions with artists”.

• 2019 MIT Press, 384pp £23.25hb