The Future of Science is Art

Jonah Lehrer is one of my favorite science writers.  (He's cute too!  Always helps.)  He uses a language that can excite anyone who reads it.  So when I stumbled on Seed Magazine's The Future of Science is Art, I wasn't all that surprised he had written it.  The article argues exactly what it states - science cannot overcome its current limitations without art.  

As I read it, I pulled so many quotes from the article, that I finally gave up and just want you to read the whole damn thing. (Can I swear on blogs?)  Here it is again. 

But there a few things that I wanted to share, for those with short attention spans.  

Lehrer uses a few artistic examples to point out how art can explain something before it even needs explaining.  To wit: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, enchanted with opium, was writing poetry about the 'the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking' long before there was even a science of the mind...Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception."  Art is essential to understanding what we're even looking for.

We seek to quantify in this world; more and more so as we rely on technologies that understand quantities in ways they could never understand qualities.  Google can show you thousands of websites in a split-second, but you may never get to the one that has the article about light-paintings with the video imbedded. (I found that one after a 2-minute search and only because I remembered I had seen it on Science Friday.)  

But just because it's quantifiable, it doesn't mean it's better.  It doesn't mean it can answer the questions.  As Lehrer begins to dissect physics, he states, "...[its] surreal nature is precisely why it needs the help of artists. The science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense."

This is where Escher can explain something that math never can.  "Relativity" reveals how our minds work more quickly and cleanly than many neuro-scientific studies.  This is where poetic metaphor can unlock ideas that would confound most lay people.  (Or even scientists!  Ever heard the one about our universe being a hole in a block of swiss cheese?  It's mind-boggling.)  This is where James Joyce's Ulysses can capture the essence of humanity more completely than any study of neurons.   

I'm beginning to step on Mr. Lehrer's toes (I need to meet him, so I can finally call him Jonah), so I will refer you back to the article.  But I would like to add something to his words.  Lehrer, too, recalls The Two Cultures (see my previous blog if you have no idea what I'm talking about) and says, more eloquently than I ever could, "The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories...By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress...Art can make science better."

But science can make art better too.  Science is making art better.  From a purely technological viewpoint, art is being created that could never have been conceived in earlier eras.  But to broaden this idea a little more, let's incorporate science fiction.  Star Trek has just hit theatres, and I would call that a work of art.  How much more amazing is it to know that warp drive and quantum teleportation can, and in fact, have happened? (This will be in my next posting - stay tuned.)  That there is a basis in reality for these things?  For me, it makes Star Trek so much more engaging, and it brings a different kind of beauty to it.  This could be our world someday.  Science could be art.