The ‘elevated’ thinking of science and storytelling

Stories are more than mere entertainment… they’re invitations to challenge our worldview.

Powerful narratives force us to rethink what we believe to be true — and in this respect, storytelling has far more in common with scientific inquiry than it does indulgent creative impulses.

I was reminded of this inseparable and improbable relationship between science and creativity this week while reading a fascinating interview with one of my favorite contemporary directors: Christopher Nolan.

To help promote his new film, Oppenheimer, the director and writer spoke with Wired magazine about his love for science — and how that love has infected his moviemaking.

The relationship between storytelling and the scientific method fascinates me… I'm passionately committed to truth. I love the scientific method. I hate to see it distorted either by scientists in the media or by media speaking for scientists. The pure scientific method, the idea that science seeks to disprove itself constantly, it so elevated human thinking beyond any other form — religion, ­whatever — that we've chosen to engage in as a species.

Much of the interview was as highly interesting as that single insight — even if Wired was trying a little too hard to equate the birth of the atomic age with the advent of artificial intelligence. (I mean, c’mon: AI is certainly revolutionary — but developing software that can think for itself isn’t quite the same as developing a bomb that had a “non-zero” chance of ripping apart the fabric of reality upon detonation.)

Nolan’s observation that the scientific method is crafted specifically to disprove one’s hypothesis, however, deserved a bit more conversation than it received by the magazine.

Sure, his comments clearly underscore the love and admiration he has for scientific inquiry, theoretical challenges and intellectual exercises — but it also alluded to the kind of “elevated thinking” needed for telling powerful stories.  

It’s no secret that Nolan is a bit of a science geek. His 2014 science fiction epic, Interstellar, was widely praised for its sincere attempt to explore the mind-bending principles at the core of how our universe operates. Aside from being an absolutely devastatingly emotional ride, Interstellar dove into theoretical questions of physics and time dilation as a way to fuel its protagonist through an unexpectedly powerful character arc.

Indeed, the movie was a reoccurring theme in Nolan’s interview — and with good reason: that film highlighted what he views as the inseparable relationship between scientific inquiry and narrative:

Well, I've always been interested in astronomy, in questions of physics. I got to explore that in Interstellar. When my brother wrote the script, he would look at Einstein's thought experiments, and he identified a particular melancholy that some of them had. It's all to do with parts in time. All to do with, like, twins who get separated and one goes away and comes back and the other's older, you know? There's a very literary quality to Einstein onward in terms of thinking about physics and how you would do these thought experiments, how you conceive of these ideas and how they work. The process of visualization that physicists need isn't so different from a literary process.

As Nolan rightly articulates, the ability to explore the happenings of the natural world demands a certain imaginative creativity of its own. After all, there’s a reason some of the most brilliant scientific minds in human history have also been poets, artists, sculptors or writers.

And at the heart of the scientific method is the act of willfully attempting to disprove one’s own understanding of reality — not merely collecting data that confirms one’s preconceived hypotheses. Those scientists who seek to challenge their assumptions are the ones who stumble across new ideas, fresh perspectives and new “truths” about the universe.

Powerful storytelling demands much the same sort of self-inflicted scrutiny. The characters, the audience, and even the storyteller must all be challenged in ways that undermine their understanding of the world in which the story takes place.