The Art-Science Connection

The many comections between art and science have been examined in essays concerning poetry, metaphor, and artwork.

This is a broad and multifarious specialty, of course, requiring far more space than we could hope to give it; but by selecting a few topics, issues, and examples of scholarship, we can attempt to convey a sense of what is involved in the study of art and science. While their activities may differ, scientists and artists share one essential component in their work. We can say, however, that the scientist who develops a theory or designs an expwintent is no less creative than the artist who produces a pairtting or sculpture, also notes that artists and scientists share certain motivations.

Artists and aeientista share a sensitivity to aesthetics in their work, although their criteria for “beauty” may be quite different. Many also share a desire to make a positive contribution to the welfare of humanity.

Scientists and artists share another impxtant attributtx their labors depend largely on interpreting nature, or the natural world. Nature, of course, has been one of the main sources of artistic inspiration for as long as humans have made art.

The British aestheticiart Harold Osborne also discusses attists, scientists, and their relationship to nature. Both groups, he notes, seek a sense of order in the natural world. He notes that, while an aesthetic response may be elicited by “the diverse kinds of order in nature discovered and described by scientists, ‘‘ it is artworks made by artists that are “the most powerfully effective objects for the evocation and expansion of aesthetic experience . . .. Scientists, on the contrary, discover but do not make the order that occurs in nature. But the statements they make about order may themselves have intellectual beauty. ‘‘