The Invisibility of Math and Science

I've been rolling this idea around in my head for awhile, and thought this would be a perfect place to air it out.  

The real purpose of this blog is to find connections between science and the arts.  Meaningful connections.  The kind that open up possibilities on both sides of the aisle.  To me, one can only enhance the other, but this is a relatively new concept for me.  I knew I was going to be an actress when I was in the sixth grade.  I didn't even make it through AP Biology because it was interfering with all the shows I was doing.  And for most of my life, I thought that was completely fine.  What one earth would I need biology for?

Now, of course, I think the complete opposite, but I know where these ideologies come from.  Biology (and most of higher level science and math) doesn't seem necessary to a lay person's way of life.  And that's because science and math are invisible.  They're designed to be.

How many of you have an iPhone?  How many of you have a cell phone?  That slim, wireless, no-antenna'd piece of technology stems directly from new breakthroughs in math and science, one of them being fractals.  I bet you had no idea about that.

But I would also bet that you've seen this somewhere:

This is a visualization of fractals, a piece of art derived from math, if you will.  There was a craze a few years back and these images were everywhere.  It was math made visible.  Yet I have no idea how these images can make my cell phone get smaller every time I upgrade.  A perfect opportunity lost.  

Art, by its very nature, is visible.  The reason for art is to gather a community, to share a concept, to explain and to explore together.  This could very easily be the case for science too, but we've pushed it aside and allowed others to explore without us.  It's become invisible.  I don't want to know how a series of 0s and 1s can become the internet.  The internet has been handed to me and I don't have to do the thinking, so why should I?

Ah, yes, well.  Here's why.  In a fortuitous happenstance, while I was searching the Internet for definitions on fractals, I found this.  Benoit Mandelbrot, the man who coined the term fractal (and has the cutest old-man face I have ever seen), also wrote a book called The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Trouble.  He claims that our fundamental financial assumptions are flawed (we are a rhythmic species, so therefore the market should be rhythmic), and backs it up with fractal analysis. (I'll point you toward a wikipedia page on the Elliot Wave Principle to explain this further.)

This isn't exactly art, true, but it does prove my point.  We don't understand the concepts behind our technologies and our complex world, because science and math have succeeded in making themselves autonomous.  Invisible.  But what if we understood the fundamentals?  If we once again gathered a community and discussed the technologies we're using, explored them and explained them?  We might be able to save ourselves some serious global heartache.