more like it (1450 words)(art and science rant)

[ritaxis]

In just under four hours. Including running off to the bathroom every so often and distracting myself online too much (DSL has its downside).

I stopped because I'm in the middle of a scene which formerly resolved a certain way and now I think it should probably resolve a different way. And because I want to take a nap anddo something useful before the nice fellow comes home and it's time to get the kid.

The kid, for reasons I kind of understand but can't explain, is going to interview for an art college tomorrow, though she wants to go to a comprehensive school where she can study science and art at the same time.

This whole science-art divide thing is so artificial . . . I remember it used to make my mother (a scientific illustrator)furious. It causes Emma strange experiences. Her science camp chemistry teacher used to enthuse for hours about how rare and difficult it was to be arty and scientific at the same time. Her bagpipe teacher was greatly relieved when she said she was considering studying art -- "I'm glad you're not going to engineering school" he said, meaning to be complimentary (as in, "you are too cool, too wise, and too talented, to waste yourself in dull old engineering") -- but it infuriated Emma.

But, I ask you, even granting that Leonardo Da Vinci probably wasn't exactly a human being, how is it possible to draw the line? Illustration, design, expression, modelling, experimentation -- all of these are both science and art. Art is not magic. Or not more than science is.

No, magic is just the very fact of existence: the fact that anything exists at all is wondrous. Everything else is pattern and chaos.

Comments

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I think there's an important difference between "studying engineering" and "studying at an engineering school." The latter is much more likely to be limiting, especially to a teenager who goes in with limited experience. It's worse if the engineering school is geographically or culturally isolated. (MIT students, for instance, benefit from living amid the crowd of Boston/Cambridge/Somerville students enthusiastic about a huge variety of subjects.)

I did graduate work at a specialized engineering school...people who studied there as undergraduates (when I was there in the 1990s) learned a fair amount of science and engineering, but it all seemed terribly focused and limiting. And I was appalled at the way sexism and casual bigotry were taken for granted. The big state school where I had done my undergraduate degree had a much more pervasive liberal culture -- intellectually questioning, socially tolerant, closer to demographically diverse. (Far from perfect, of course. But orders of magnitude better.) Part of it might have been the advantages of a big school over a small one, or the advantages of a midwestern school over a northeastern one. But I think mixing liberal arts with engineering students is good for both.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure of the advantages to a comprehensive school, especially for someone like Emma -- (I know you're reading this, Emma. I'm not telling any of your secrets, ok?) If there's a definition needed for "interdisciplinary student," we should look at her. (we're looking at you, dear)

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Roald Hoffmann is a theoretical chemist writes rather thoughtful poetry about chemistry. There's a book of his poems out there somewhere, called _Gaps and Verges_, but I have no idea if its still in print.

Primo Levi is famous for _Survival in Auschwitz_. But he went home and had a career as an analytical chemist, and continued writing stories and essays. It's wonderful stuff. When I was young and had read too much CP Snow (on the insurmountable barriers preventing communication between scientists and humanists), Primo Levi knocked me flat and showed me how everything connected. Should connect. _The Periodic Table_ is a good place to start. I am particularly fond of his essay on the moon landing in _The Mirror Maker_, though Emma might be too young for it.

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

Has Emma read Godel, Escher, Bach? One of the most beautiful aspects of that book is the way it weaves artistic and scientific topics, treating each as an expression of human creativity.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I was foolish; I bought for several years the idea that one must love the arts (fine or liberal) or the sciences, and not both. That persisted until just this year, when circumstances conspired to make me take a computer science class... which I now love, absurdly much.

So many things are important and interesting and beautiful, in their own ways, and the human mind is far larger than some people allow for.

Science, Art and Leonardo

[mavarin.livejournal.com]

"But, I ask you, even granting that Leonardo Da Vinci probably wasn't exactly a human being,"

I'm intrigued by this throwaway clause. Care to elaborate?

It is a continuting source of shame to me that I never took physics, largely because I had so much trouble with both chemistry and intermediate algebra. Still, nobody ever conveyed to me the idea that one should be good in the arts OR sciences, but not both. After all, the sf field involves a confluence of the two. Have attitudes changed so much in the past 30 years, or is your daughter's experience an isolated case?

Karen
dropping in from Making Light

Re: Science, Art and Leonardo

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Leonardo da Vinci was just too superlative everything, you know? He figured out things he could not, given the materials and resources at hand, ever test.

And well, nobody overtly says that except the chemistry teacher (who gave it the lie in the same sentence alking about the music he and his son played, silly man: but that wasn't the only silly thing he ever did). But they often kind of take sides in this stupid made-up conflict. Like the silly bagpipe teacher. Who was really mainly expressing his support of her artsiness.

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

From Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water:

One darkening afternoon, as she was leaving the [Art Students] League's Fifty-seventh Street building, Marilyn [Hacker] was accosted by an interviewer and some cameramen, doing a section for that night's ten-o'clock TV news. 'Why, in this age of science,' he asked her, along with half a dozen others making their way home, 'do you want to be an artist?'

'I don't really see that much difference between them,' Marilyn answered, into their lenses through hers. 'Both are based on fine observation of the world.'