A necessary evil? An installation by Andy Warhol on display at London?s Tate Modern Gallery

Abstraction has been a necessary evil of human civilisation since the days of cave paintings. The new wave of French cinema has long died out, but not before gems like Pierrot le Fou had taken the memorable auspices of movie aficionados; the New York School of paintings has been reborn countless times with some remarkably esoteric ideas (among them, the less-heard-of installation ?artist?s excrement in can?); abstraction in writings has been less forthcoming (although, who could forget the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges in his intimately personal Tl?, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius?).

Yet, the bits and pieces notwithstanding, science itself has remained soundly abstract in essence and principle to even a good many scientists. If that sounds outrageous, explain why spacetime is indeed shaped like a saddle, or the quirky gadget zapping acr-oss inside an atom ? yes, you guessed it right ? is sometimes also a wave.

At times it won?t be a bad idea to take such esoteric ideas in science ? a sizeable number, surely ? with the largest grain of salt that your brain can concoct. But here?s where the added problem with science creeps in: unlike religion or the mumbo-jumbo of astrology, it all works! In fact, if the simple realisation of science as a bunch of impenetrable equations which also works really hits you, it can fill you with inscrutable joy, the kind of feeling people sometimes term abstract.

But is such realisation the greatest invention since the wheel? Well, if you were talking to the Almighty and usually ignorant American President, he will tell you why murdering his already sickly line of stem cells proves this very fact. If you were instead talking to the insignificant Einstein, you might also think so, but for a wholly different set of reasons (?the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible?). If we were to be given endless liberty to speculate on such matters, and do so in the most libertarian way, we could think of a scenario where nature, in all of its staggering beauty and breathtaking power, is free to act according to its laws that it alone has control over. Abstraction, then, turns out to be a non-starter, since the human bra-in is not built to think in that manner.

Imagine the paradox: intelligence ? a wholly natural, possibly insignificant, but probably emergent outcome of that very abstraction ? still renders itself incompatible to its creative forces.

So abstraction is here to stay, and our brains better adapt to its fecundity. Worse, science will never be able to truly ?explain? tornadoes and the feeling in some of us that we call love. As a matter of fact, all of reality can be deemed abstract, from such blowing winds to the firing of neurons in romantic yearning. Laws and rules ? all of them ? are then simply built to be closely approximate.