"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science." — Albert Einstein

One of the great mysteries of my life is how hard people have worked to link up art and science. The argument always seems to be that because they both come up with things that often amaze us, they must be fundamentally the same and ergo, must fundamentally be able to speak to one another.

Bosh, I say. But before I expand on that response, let me first refer you to a session entitled "Art and Science: Opportunities for Interaction" I attended at the Euroscience Open Forum held in Barcelona in July.

There, Monica Guerreiro of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture showed participants the creations that had resulted when eight Portuguese artists were allowed to spend three to six months in scientists' laboratories. She began by describing some previous efforts to link up art and science. There was "bio artist" Eduardo Kac's creation of a transgenic bunny. It had the gene of a jellyfish inserted into its DNA so that when a type of blue light was shown on Alba the rabbit, the creature lit up a florescent green.

Then there was Marta de Menezes, who went into a lab in Holland and bred butterflies to create wing patterns never before seen in nature. These are efforts that suggest Victor Frankenstein should not be seen as a mad scientist but as perhaps the pre-eminent modern artist.

The Portuguese program was more wide-ranging. One artist, Soraya Vasconcelos, went into a laboratory to create new prosthetic devices. She produced a modern Pinocchio made out of aesthetically combined prosthetic parts.

Patrícia Noronha integrated herself into a biology lab and was inspired to create acrylic works of art out of the patterns that micro-organisms produce while growing in petri dishes.

André Igor Oliveira e Castro installed himself in a physics laboratory where various meteorological measures — temperature, pressure, humidity, wind — were being taken. The artist transformed the measurements into sound, which some might call music.

It was all clearly interesting, but then one skeptic — okay, me — raised his hand and asked whether there ever had been a program that attempted the opposite? That is, take eight scientists and put them in artists' studios and see what kind of science they were inspired to create?

Much hubbub in the room ensued, and the answer that came back was that nobody knew of such a reverse inspirational effort, and after some mulling over of the question, it became clear why not.

Artists — particularly visual artists — can be moved by anything they see, but scientists don't express their work merely as something visual. Science is about proof. A scientific paper is actually a relentless and often boring (to the outsider) methodological explanation. The paper says: here is how I arrived at my conclusions; here are the techniques I used and the data they generated; now, if anyone who reads this paper follows my formula, they will be able to arrive at my conclusions.

Indeed, the way we know a scientist's conclusions are, in fact, true is if others succeed in replicating them. In science, a totally unique, irreproducible finding isn't a work of genius; it is a mistake. Now, can one imagine a modern artist who thinks the value of his or her work will be determined by how closely other artists can replicate it? Is there an artist alive who wants to sketch out for other artists their "methodologies," so they can be relentlessly copied?

Another factor is that modern science is relentlessly quantitative. You don't show your findings to others as a simple visual representation of something and then say: this is beautiful, ergo it must be true. You present numbers, and more numbers and numbers expressing numbers. A scientist's work is always relentlessly reductionist while an artist's isn't.

Rather, an artist wants you to get lost in the mystery of how she or he got from inspiration A to creation B. Artworks are, in many ways, relentlessly expansionist.

Finally, there is the question of technology. Artists can go into the lab and make things out of what they see, but most modern scientists — particularly those in the physical and biological sciences — require advanced technology to do anything.

"Scientists can't do science in a studio," Bent Norgaard of the Centre for Art and Science at the University of Southern Denmark told me after the Barcelona session.

I would go further and say that in many areas of research, intelligence has been replaced by technology as the chief driving force in scientific advancement. Having a Hubble Space Telescope or a supercomputer available with which do your science is not just important; it is all-important.

So, why the urge to link up science and art? My guess is that we simply can't accept that two ways of arriving at deep truths can't communicate effectively. Or maybe more accurately, science can talk to art, but art can't talk to science. We have trouble believing that we have created explorations of reality that don't fit. But we have. So, maybe the biggest mystery is not Einstein's musing on the power of the mysterious but the fact that we can hold in our brains these two fundamentally opposing ways of understanding reality and somehow believe both can be true.

That's not just mysterious; that's spooky.