Arts & Science &emdash; So similar, yet so different. At first sight, arts and science could not be more different from each other, but once thoroughly reflecting upon the parallel between the two, the similarities seems countless.

For as long as science has been studied, it has been based on observations. Arts, just like science, are mere representations of reality. Everything we learn, everything we discover, everything we establish about the knowledge of what surrounds us, is restricted to AND BY our means of observation. This is a concept that most artists from the 20^th Century recognized and embodied through their artworks.

La reproduction interdite by René Magritte was the source of my inspiration. My intention was to portray the idea of science being restricted by observation, along with a little insight of the wave-particle duality of light. I therefore chose to do an auto portrait –a painting, to display those subjects as best as I could.

At first, my plan was to do the painting with two sides; one representing reality and the other, the reflection of reality through a mirror. The elements present in the painting that would carry most importance would be:

1. 1. My auto portrait (with eyes closed) standing in front of the mirror, and the reflection of my auto portrait (making a silly face);
2. 2. The light shining through the 2 window slits, appearing on the wall –in the reality side, as well as in the mirror.

The auto portrait and its reflection depict how things behave differently when they are not observed (it can also be seen the other way around, meaning things behave differently when they are observed). Hence, the eyes of the auto portrait are closed and the reflection is mocking its “original”. This represents how science is restricted to what the eye can see, therefore whatever else that is beyond it, can only be assumed, but will never be established as an absolute truth. Subsequently, the depiction of the light shining through the 2 window slits, appearing on the wall, bears the significance of the wave-particle duality of light by referring to the double slit experiment. On the reality side of the painting, light appears on the wall as two bands (particle behavior), whereas the in the reflection through the mirror, the light appears as multiple bands on the wall (wave behavior). The reality side reinforces the idea of Einstein, suggesting that light is quantized and that it is “a shower of particles”, rather than a wave. The reflection, on the other hand, shows the wave nature of light by appearing as multiple bands, due to the destructive interference and diffraction interactions between the waves. Supposing an initial wave of light travels through the 2 slits, it will diffract around the 2 slits, forming 2 separate waves that will interfere with each other, both constructively and destructively, resulting in several alternative dark and light bands.

When I actually started to make my first sketch, I realized making all those elements fit in one painting was not possible for me –it wasn’t within my capacities. Therefore I decided to get rid of the 2 bands of light on the reality side, since I assumed it goes without saying, and that people would understand my painting, even without that element. All that said, the final result of my painting was my auto portrait as profile, standing in front of a mirror with eyes closed, and in the mirror, the reflection of my auto portrait, taking advantage of the fact that its “original” has its eyes closed, would be mocking it, as well as in the background, light would appear as several bands on the wall, not 2. One aspect that could’ve been improved would be the windows. Since I didn’t have enough space, I could only paint part of one window, and not 2, therefore at first glance, it would be hard to determine that the idea of wave-particle duality of light is present in my painting.