that artistic treatments of past experience
make the communication in such instances
essentially different from that in the
scientific presentations. This comes
precisely to the point. It is not that
art and science tell about different things
but that they tell about the same
things in different ways - which is the
proposition here.
Perhaps the one realm in which science
and art come closest to communicating
in the same way is in the instance
of projected experience. In science,
projected experience is the basis of
hypothesizing about the conditions that
would occur under a given set of
circumstances. For example, an
explanation of the Fitzgerald contraction
could be phrased as a concept that
proposes to us that a space ship traveling
at a speed near the speed of light would,
relative to an observer on the earth,
contract in size together with everything in
it so that a clock on board would
slow down and the measuring devices and
all other instrumentalities in it would
similarily be altered for the earthbound
observer although they would not
166     have done so for the voyager on the space
ship. Such an explanation is the phrasing
of scientific theory in hypothetical
rather than past experience. The
use of such imagined conditions for
exemplifying or formulating scientific
concepts are sometimes called thought
experiments because they constitute a
cerebral production of a potential
framework for considering scientific
phenomena. Again, one might object at
this point that a scientist might do this in
an attempt to explain science to the layman
but that no serious scientist would
actually work in this way. As a matter
of fact the history of science provides
some impressive examples where
hypothesis and subsequent partial
validations have leaped beyond the precise
validation that people are prone to cite
as the "real" way science works.
It is noteworthy, for example, that the
mathematical validation of Faraday's
formulations on electromagnetism
were worked out substantially later by
Clerk Maxwell. One would hardly say that
the reality of the concepts was any less
substantial for Faraday because he
did not have the same sort of proof that
the inheritors of Maxwell's mathematical


characterizations have at their command.
In literature, projected experience takes the
form of the allegory, the fantasy and
the myth. Works such as The Fairy Queen,
The Martian Chronicles, The Animal Farm,
or The Rhinoceros are projections of what
might well be the human situation under a
given set of cricumstances that are
probable or improbable. They are the
artist's counterpart of the hypothetical
physical situations that engross the scientist
when he conducts a thought experiment.
One might say, therefore, that the
thought experiment is the scientific
equivalent of a metaphor as allegory and
other non-literal forms are the
artistic versions of the thought experiment.
Of course, even in the realm of
projected experience artistic and scientific
communications do not take identical
form. A comparison of the treatment given
to the same concept in a scientific
and an artistic way will provide us with an
illustration of the variant forms that these
two communications take. For this
purpose, let us consider a poetic and a
scientific treatment of the second law of
thermodynamics.  Essentially, the
second law of thermodynamics says that
heat can be converted into energy to
perform work, and as an inevitable
consequence of the conversion of this
energy into work, some of the energy is
wasted. That is, some of the heat is
dissipated. It does not, of course,
disappear, but passes off into the
environment. This loss of heat is
called entropy, which, since it inevitably
occurs, is constantly increasing in the
universe. The increase of entropy has led
to the conclusion that the universe is
running down and faces in the
remote future a heat death, which is a
state where the progressive dissipation of
heat will result in a homogeneous
heat state throughout the universe that
might be called a chaos of formlessness. In
view of these potential conditions, then,
the second law of thermodynamics says
that work cannot be performed
without some expenditure of energy
resulting in heat loss.
There has for some time been a thought
experiment that has intrigued a number
of scientists in connection with
ramifications of this law.