n Joseph Wright of Derby's painting "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump," dated 1768, we see a stunning demonstration that air is vital for life. A white cockatoo has been taken from its cage and placed in a covered glass jar, and the air has just been pumped out by levers and pistons. Deprived of oxygen, the beautiful bird languishes at the bottom of its new cage, listlessly stretching one wing, dead within seconds if air is not let back into its container.

In the dimly lighted room, several people stare at the airless container in hypnotized fascination. But there are other reactions as well. A small girl looks up at the bird with pity and dread; another young woman is so overwhelmed that she covers her eyes. A man in a beige jacket points his finger at the bird as if explaining the principles of science involved. Another observer has taken out his watch to time the experiment. The largest figure of all, the lecturer, holds his left hand poised on the cap of the jar, able at any moment to let the precious air back in and thus restore life to the bird. Taken together, the spectators' faces reveal the full range of attitudes about science.

Wright's painting, to my mind, is a magnificent synthesis of science and art. Moreover, it emerged from a long tradition of fusing the two. Lucretius's ancient poem "De Rerum Natura" is a beautiful and sensuous exposition of the theory of atoms. Fontenelle's 17th-century book "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds" imagines a series of romantic meetings between a lady and gentleman, during which he explains the new science of Copernicus and Descartes. Wright himself kept well abreast of new developments in science. He was a member of the Lunar Society, a group of English scientists, artists and philosophers who met monthly on the Monday nearest the full moon. Later artists inspired by science included Goethe, Mary Shelley, Thomas Eakins, H. G. Wells, Karel Capek, Bertolt Brecht.

The longstanding love affair between scientists and artists continues, as exemplified by the recent films "A Beautiful Mind" and "Pi," the plays "Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard and "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn, the novels "The Gold Bug Variations" by Richard Powers and "The Mind-Body Problem" by Rebecca Goldstein, and the various exhibitions based on the double helix now in New York. Art has always wrestled with emerging ideas. Science has always been a rich source for those ideas. As Salman Rushdie said to an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in late 1993, "Many of us writers of my generation have felt that in many ways the cutting edge of the new is to be found in the sciences."

So what exactly does science have to offer the arts? What are the particular ways in which science provokes us, inspires us and examines who we are?

First are the scientific concepts themselves, many of them mind bending in the best sense of the term. Copernicus's astronomical model, in which the earth orbits the sun instead of vice versa, challenged centuries of belief that we are the center of the universe. After Darwin we have been forced to recognize new relatives hanging from the family tree. Einstein's theory of relativity, showing that clocks and human bodies moving with respect to each other measure time at different rates, strikes at our deepest and most private understanding of physical experience. Meanwhile, the ability to decode and manipulate our genetic instructions or to alter our individual personalities with drugs raises questions about personal identity, about boundaries between living things and mechanistic machines, about freedom of action versus predetermined behavior.

Then there is the portrayal of the scientist. By now it is well known that the picture of the scientist as the eccentric personality without human feeling, pursuing truth by the numbers, wearing sterile gloves at all times, is false. But the particular way that a person trained in logical thinking must negotiate his or her way through the illogical world of human passions — that is a subject worthy of art. The contradictions and creative tensions between reason and intuition, certainty and uncertainty, deliberation and spontaneity provide fodder for ruminating on that forever surprising object called human nature.

James D. Watson's scientific autobiography "The Double Helix" gives an honest view of the fierce ambition, jealousies and competitiveness of scientists at work. The two atomic physicists in Mr. Frayn's "Copenhagen," Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, confront the ethical dimensions of the deadliest scientific achievement of all time.

In a touching moment in James Gleick's biography "Genius," the great physicist Richard Feynman writes a letter to his wife, Arline, who had died of tuberculosis two years earlier. "It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you," he says. "I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing." The letter continues: "I want to tell you that I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you."

And finally, what science can offer art is that most subtle quality of all, the way that scientists think, the way they live in the world, or what one might call the mind of science. Science and art have different ways of thinking, and those differences, when explored and portrayed, can enlarge both activities.

For example, scientists struggle mightily to name things. To name a thing, you've distilled it and purified it, you've quantified it; you've put a box around the thing and said, "What's in the box is the thing, and what's not is not." Consider the word "electron." To a scientist the word electron represents a unique subatomic particle with specified properties. Scientists believe that all of the zillions of electrons in the universe are identical and that all of them are described by the same equation, called the Dirac equation. It gives scientists a comfort, a sense of power, a feeling of control to be able to name things in this way.

By contrast, artists tend to avoid naming things. A novelist can use a word like "love," but that word doesn't convey much in itself because each reader will experience love in a different way. To name a thing too precisely can destroy that delicate, participatory creative experience that happens when a good reader reads a good book. Every electron is the same, but every love is different.

Science also thinks in terms of questions with answers, whereas in art the answer is less important than the question and sometimes not existent at all. Although scientific theories are constantly revised to accord with new data, at any given moment a scientist works by framing a question with enough precision that it is guaranteed an answer. How does a star produce light? How does the body get energy? Why is diamond stronger than wood? And so on.

As a graduate student in physics, I was taught not to waste time on questions that did not have definite answers. But, of course, there are many interesting questions that do not fit into that category, like what is the nature of God. Or would we be happier if we lived to be a thousand years old? As Rilke advised a young poet, "We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue."

These differences represent different ways of being in the world. And, like travels to strange lands, they challenge our assumptions; they disturb us in creative ways.

It is not easy to portray science in art and also to maintain the integrity of the art. Pitfalls abound. To my taste, nothing demolishes a novel, a film or a play faster than a pedantic tone. For me, the power of art is in its ability to make an emotional connection. As soon as the viewer or reader feels that she is getting a lecture in Physics 101, that magical connection is destroyed. What the novel or play has to offer is a journey with a fellow human being, a search for meaning in our baffling world. We may eventually get to the brain, but we go first to the stomach, or the heart.

In Thomas Pynchon's novel "The Crying of Lot 69," the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics and its dismal decree that all information inevitably crumbles away is made vivid by a woman named Oedipa, who wonders how many men have slept on a sailor's burning mattress, how many lives lost forever. In the film "A Beautiful Mind," the precision of John Nash's mathematical mind forms an unsettling counterpoint to the confusion in his hallucinatory illusions.

When the science is integrated so that it is part of the human drama, part of the beauty and mystery of human existence, then science and art have achieved a perfect harmony.