Art and Science

The museum of natural history and museum of fine arts in Vienna are exactly mirror images of each other on the outside. The equality really struck me, as did the effort inside the natural sciences museum to join art and science. A cheesy effort was setting botticelli's famous painting of Venus standing in a clam shell next to a real shell. But the most effective effort was simply situating the museum in such an artistically beautiful setting!

More and more, I wonder what the difference is between science, at least biology from my experience, and the forms of music, literature, and design that we consider creative art. As scientists, we call our process of discovery "stories". It's not uncommon to say of a published paper, wow that was a great story. And we say that those who come up with the most ingenious experiments are creative, which they are.

Mainly, though, both art and science are obsessed with the search for truth. For science, a more general truth about the universal world, and for art, an expression of personal truth. If you think about it, though, don't we commend the art that expresses a personal truth that can relate to the most people? I'd say, each piece of artwork is an artist's experiment to find out something more about the world. Works are under constant revision, and there is a power of the artistic community to build on each other and create dialogue to gather the most truth about the universe from the tools that they have.

Today I learned about Arnold Schoenberg, a composer who pioneered the use of a twelve-tone scale in composition. The pieces are composed mathematically, using specified transpositions from performing different operations on the scale ( e.g. multiplication, inversion..). While the rigor is interesting (and generally I absolutely love math/science references in art), I question a little bit the works in which Schoenberg and his followers are so disinclined to deviate from their formula that it creates discordant meaningless sounds. When trying to do an "experiment" to understand more about the world, how can they impose order on it? Isn't this like the scientists who fudges the data just enough so that his data will fit perfectly with his model? How can we discover more by imposing our rules on the world? Anyway, I have bought a Schoenberg CD and I plan to explore the matter a little big further.


Just to share, off the top of my head, here are a few math/science/art items that come to mind.

Poem -- "A Valediction, Forbidden Mourning" by John Donne. I like his clever metaphor to a compass.

Artists -- M.C. Escher is an all time favorite. Victor Vasarely (I just learned about him when I decided to go to his museum in Budapest. He quit medical school to go into art. I wonder if he falls into the folly I described in my last paragraph, but he was interesting and comes to mind now, nonetheless).

Music -- Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern (all I learned today, so I don't have a recommendation or opinions yet)