"When you're lying on your back looking at the stars, or one of those little circles of the moon... Man, go away, that's so beautiful! That's a miracle, really a miracle."
The son of a draftsman-illustrator, he knew as a young boy that he would seek his own future in science. Vincent Icke (Utrecht 1946) went on to study theoretical physics and astronomy and, aged just 26, obtained his PhD on the origin of galaxies. He became professor of astronomy in Leiden. He researched the "hydrodynamics of high-energy and relativistic flows of gas around dying stars" and the "influence of vacuum fluctuations on the dynamics of the universe", but for most people he is mainly the hip professor with the piercing gaze and the inseparable earring who sits down again and again with TV programmes like De Wereld Draait Door to talk about the wonder of the cosmos. Why does space weigh nothing? Icke comes to explain. A new galaxy discovered? Icke travels to Hilversum. Meanwhile, he wrote numerous books, including the recently released Travel agency Einstein, on the sense and nonsense of space travel, and there were exhibitions of his other 'work'. For Icke is not only a leading scientist, he is also a visual artist.
No, you cannot define beauty and so he does not venture into it, says Icke in his room in the astronomy laboratory at Leiden University. He apologises for the mess. There is a renovation going on and his room has gradually shrunk to the point where the walls full of books seem to come at you. "I've already had to get rid of a lot of books, but you won't hear me complain," he says.
Elegance
"Simplicity plays a role in his profession," Icke says after some thought, "simplicity and elegance". He quotes the seventeenth-century scientist Herman Boerhaave. "His motto was: 'simplex sigillum veri', or 'simplicity is the mark of the true': use simplicity as a compass. He was not concerned with beauty, but it was ultimately an aesthetic judgement. There is a catch though: if something seems too complicated, it can also mean that you are running into your own limitations, that you just don't get it. If I were to write down the general theory of relativity line by line, I would end up with twelve or thirteen pages of text. If you see that in front of you, you think: well, go ahead, sink in, that can't possibly be right. But expressed in mathematical terms, you're left with a tiny snertformul. Then you think: ah, fine, so that's it!"
Then you see its beauty?
"In theoretical physics, it is always about the question: can it be less. The matter around you has billions of different forms, and then people like Dalton and Lavoisier come along and show that you can make all that with a handful of elements. I find that summarising what's in there very fascinating, have always found it very true."
"This may sound arrogant, but my experience was different from most other children's in that I knew so much about it at a very young age."
You avoid the word beauty, isn't it a beauty experience?
"That experience of beauty is there, but it is very culturally determined. A Maori finds very different things beautiful from us. The abstract idea of beauty does exist in both, and the response it has in your mind, the tingling of your senses, is also similar across cultures. But talking about beauty is difficult, the word means different things under different circumstances."
Youth
At one time, as a child yourself, you must have lay there looking at that universe in wonder...
"Simon Stevin's motto was: 'Wonder and is gheen wonder'. When you're lying on your back looking at the stars, or one of those moon circles. Man, go away, that's so beautiful! That's a miracle, really a miracle, that's what it feels like. But at the same time it's not a miracle either, because the reason that moon circle looks like that is because that sun and that earth and that moon have that certain configuration. That knowledge changes the experience. This may sound arrogant, but my experience was different from that of most other children in that I knew so much about it at a very young age. I could already read when I was about four years old. My parents gave me an encyclopaedia that you could save at the Blueband margarine: I know. I still have it somewhere, read to pieces. I lived in Bilthoven, we'd go to Katwijk on holiday, there I'd see the sun set, that beautiful red. But what I simultaneously also saw, is that the sun is red because the blue light is taken away by the atmosphere. I also saw the earth's rotation, because the sun does not set at all. I also saw that the planet itself is a sphere: if the planet were flat, you could see far into infinity. You would see all these different things at the same time. If you let that sink in, while you're just sitting on the beach, watching that setting sun. That is overwhelming, an extraordinarily penetrating aesthetic experience. And it was for me even when I was about five or six years old."
Does such experience also play a role in art?
"Yes, certainly, exactly how it is in my own art is hard to describe. But what you do have when you stand in front of someone else's artwork is that you see how he or she has solved something. That seems technical, but can be very emotional. A great example is that famous painting by Van Gogh: Starry Night. An amateur painter paints a star so that it gets brighter and brighter towards the centre, but Van Gogh does not. If you look closely, you will see that his stars have a yellow dot in the centre. That's so clever! When you look at a bright light, your eyes cause the central part of the spot of light to be a little darker. When I first stood in front of that painting and understood that he saw through that... tears welled up in my eyes, oh man, so beautiful!"
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