Want to imagine what the Higgs boson might look like? Embrace modern art

Uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox are central to both modern art and modern physics – and one can help us grasp the other
James Turrell
Artists like James Turrell challenge convention, forcing us to perceive the world in abstract terms that are not a world away from modern physics. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian Sarah Lee/Guardian

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may or may not be close to identifying the particle that would complete the "standard model" of modern physics. This week a sceptical statement by the director of Cern, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, reined in recent reports that scientists there have seen the Higgs boson. In a picture accompanying the Reuters story, young researchers gaze intensely at screens flashing with colour and light.

The experiments currently being performed in the LHC are enigmatic, mind-boggling and imaginative. But are they science – or art? In his renowned television series The Ascent of Man, the polymath Jacob Bronowski called the discovery of the invisible world within the atom the great collective achievement of science in the 20th century. Then he went further. "No – it is a great, collective work of art."

Niels Bohr, who was at the heart of the new sub-atomic physics in the early 20th century, put the mystery of what he and others were finding into provocative sayings. He was very quotable, and every quote stresses the ambiguity of the new realm he was opening up, the realm of the smallest conceivable things in the universe. "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet," ran one of his remarks. According to Bronowski, Bohr also said that to think about the paradoxical truths of quantum mechanics is to think in images, because the only way to know anything about the invisible is to create an image of it that is by definition a human construct, a model, a half-truth trying to hint at the real truth.

Perhaps the gap between what the researchers near Geneva are trying to do and media expectation of a sudden discovery in which the Higgs boson is brought out, blinking at the flashbulbs, to be interviewed at a press conference, has to do with an old-fashioned idea of what science actually is. Our prevailing image of science is still basically a Victorian one of true or false, proof leading to certainty. But this idea was blasted apart by modern physics; it has been out of date for at least a century. The point of all Bohr's wacky sayings – "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but a question" – was to get across his realisation that modern physics deals in uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox.

We won't understand what those guys at Cern are up to until our idea of science catches up with the greatest minds of the 20th century who blew apart all previous conventions of thought. One guide offers itself to those of us who are not physicists: modern art. Bohr, explained Bronowski, collected Cubist paintings. Cubism was invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at the same time modern physics was being created: its crystalline structures and opaque surfaces suggest the astonishment of a reality whose every microcosmic particle is sublimely complex.

Cubism did away with the idea that what we see with the naked eye is what matters. It dug deeper, towards the inner forms of life. Cézanne got there first, then the abstract painters pushed still further: Kandinsky and Miró point towards the profound realities of quantum physics as these gradually emerged after the first world war.

If you were going to put a piece of art on the cover of a modern science book, should it be Jacob Epstein's head of Einstein? No, it should be a mind-boggling modern artwork: perhaps one of James Turrell's installations, which challenge perceptions of reality and so open up the kinds of questions physicists ever since Einstein have asked.

This brings us to the question of reality and abstraction in art. There are those for whom an abstract painter like Cy Twombly just daubs suggestive nothings. But if he does, so does modern physics. In the age of uncertain principles, abstract art is more truthful than realistic pictures. It hints at the true state of human knowledge. We need to embrace modern art if we are to imagine the Higgs boson. A start would be to recognise that, of the two great painters who have recently died, the realist was not Freud but Twombly.