080 Drawing The Line

"The only thing self-evident about art is that it is not self-evident"

This is a series of entries about the topic of what art is to us, and where art lies in our heart…

Part Two: Can science ever be artistic?

Reminds you of that HSBC advertisement which compares two different photos and labels, doesn't it? Today's entry is about distinguishing between art and science. At first glance, these two fields are very different. An artist may never take interest in matters of science, while scientists have no sense of beauty. But, let us try to challenge this view...

The idea of science is to explain the world around us, from why the sun rises in the morning to the very intricacies of the washing machine. Frankly, only an engineer would consider the oil-drenched underbelly of a car to be beautiful and relish in the thought of having to examine gears and axels, and I think this is the desciption of a very rare species of engineers. However, science has also revealed some of the most beautiful things in our universe. It is Science that takes us one step closer to understand the beauty of the combined functionality of every single part of the human body. How can the human body, a machine more complex thn any supercomputer we have ever built come into function, how did the jigsaw come together just like that? In addition, Science has even revealed to us the beauty of the world around us, without science we wouldn't be able to see the majestic rings of Saturn or the swirls of distant galaxies. Behold this picture of the Horsehead Nebula, a most magnificent picture of our universe...

Therefore, beauty itself is self-evident in Science. When we speak of scientific theories, the layman remembers very few, such as Einstein's E=mc^2, or Newton's Law of Gravitation, but why only these, out of the hundreds of theories we have? Why do we consider these people geniuses as compared to the likes of Maxwell and Faraday? It is because their theories are elegant, a nice way of saying that there is beauty in its simplicity. It is the awe we derive from realising how such simple equation can describe the complex universe we live in. It is the sublimity that comes from comphending how it could ever be possible to be defined in a manner that anyone, and everyone can grasp it in a fleeting moment. Now, that is beauty at its very best in Science.

Naturally, the next question is, does Science have a place in art? We shall see...

To be continued...