"Does it thrill you that you’re bringing C. P. Snow’s two cultures closer together?
You bet it does. Science and art are two long-lost lovers, yearning to be reunited. And now I get to be a matchmaker."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/sc...ccessible.html
--Darin
I am not impressed. Generalizing Science and Art is like generalizing a pork chop.
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
Perhaps it is more appropriate to consider the coupling of technology and art.
An example would be photography.
Science and art make fantastic bedfellows. Unfortunately most of the science-based art I see strikes me as lazy. It's by people who like idea of science, or a particular effect of science, but who haven't really explored it enough to get past the surface.
My favorite art/science matings are by people who actually do science with their art. Jonathon Keats has worked with a biology team to place God on the phylogenic tree. He's also written a symphony for the universe, with each note based on the extrapolated resonant frequency of an existing star or planet.
Christian Bök has written a poem and encoded it into the DNA of a bacterium considered to be the most indestructible organism on Earth. But that seemed too easy, so he constructed the poem so that the proteins it creates will, when decoded with the same cypher, be readable as a second poem that responds to the first. The protein also happens to glow in the dark.
If you have some time to spend with a mind that bends spoons, check out his talk .
The late Johsel Namkung was a wonderful example of a professional scientific photographer who applied his technical skills to landscape work. I believe it was a vintage 4x5/5x7 Norma he used the whole time for both.
I have become hugely cynical about most popular science these days. Even more cynical than my usual cynical self.
Most popular science contains no science. No investigation, no mystery, no challenges. Just gnostic facts in shiny suits. The success of that 'Longitude' book seems to have formed the nucleus of a motivation, but the general piecemealisation of information, the packaging of knowledge into cool, easily digestible, isolated fragments, has had a major effect too.
The problem is not that scientists fail to communicate, it is that their audience has receded further and further from them. The real rewards of science are things like experiencing the thrill of a dawning understanding; or of seeing a link between previously separate bodies of knowledge; or grasping the significance of a trivial but deeply subversive observation. These things can be explained, and people can be motivated to experience them for themselves, but explanations either rely on a shared background body of knowledge, or there must be time available for understanding to be built up from fundamentals – neither is applicable in most of today's forms of popular science.
Alan Alda deserves credit, but, for example, the rules of his 'Flame' competition ensure he'll only be doling out sound bites to his eleven year olds. They get enough of those already. I would be more impressed at attempts to communicate the interrelatedness of science, the systematics, and the way small facts aggregate into large conceptual bodies. But that requires work, and effort, not just popcorn and a front row seat.
O.K., what's wrong with the Longitude book? I'm missing your thought here.Originally Posted by Struan Gray
Why not offer us an example of popular science done right? Perhaps Faraday's lecture to the youngsters on the candle instead of Alda's format on "Flame"?
--Darin
[...snip stimulating ideas...]
Gnostic? That is a term of which I am familiar but have never put into a discussion of science, but I could!
It never says what John Harrison actually did to make his chronographs work. The thing that was most important to him, and which marked him out as different from his contemporaries, was left out in favour of a lone-inventor-against-cruel-world celebrity biography.
Faraday is surprisingly readable, and early enough in the C19th that you can follow his logic without advanced maths. Lord Kelvin and Maxwell too, although their maths gets a bit hairy towards the end.
Off the top of my head exceptions to my Jeremiad include the technical and scientific sections of the National Museum of Scotland and the re-opened Pitt Rivers museum of natural history in Oxford. Both mix modern museum-based infotainment with traditional missions to educate. Iain Stewart's geology TV shows impressed me and my kids. Some of the Royal Institution online lectures are also quite good, and continue the tradition of a lecture series in which the lectures build upon each other while still remaining popular.
I cut my teenage teeth on Eddington's and Poincaré's descriptions of space-time to the masses at the dawn of relativity. A high standard - literary as well as scientific - which I honestly don't think can be matched in commercial publishing today. There is a wholly different assumption of what an educated person should be expected to know.
I know I'm probably coming across as a 'Bah Humbug!' merchant. I'm really just saddened because what I find and found exciting about science very rarely makes it into the mainstream of popular exposition.
I think working scientists are becoming more and more of a priestly class - or scrivener monks, in the service of an analphabet king.
Trust me, I'm a doctor.
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