About

Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

CELEBRITIES of SCIENCE

Looking at ‘science’ , as I first did, through the prism of the ‘arts’, one great surprise was how it, too, pursued a pronounced ‘cult of personality’ which not only persists but seems to expand through time. The essential loneliness of the long-distance writer or artist, at his/her solitary desk or easel, contrasted, I had thought, with the more anonymous ‘groupiness’ and objective collectivity of the laboratory. A multiplicity of names on a scientific paper was, and remains, nearer the norm than any conceivable joint work by Shakespeare with Bacon or Amis with Nabokov.

It was an illusion, of course, not unlike the bigger confusion between ‘citizen’ and ‘customer’ which is deluding our Government into closing libraries and turning hospitals into shops – what Philip Pullman rightly castigates as ‘market fundamentalism’. But ‘illusion’ too, because the creativity which marks out the best of ‘arts’ and ‘science’ flies free of any stereotypes of location; and its clinching synthesis may come as readily on the top deck of the No.11 bus as among the test tubes of the Clarendon laboratory. And so it is with that cross-disciplinary ‘creative synthesis ’ between ‘science’ and ‘art’,so well described by the enigmatic Arthur Koestler in his ‘The Act of Creation’  (Hutchinson 1964).

“The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesises already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole”.

He quotes the mathematician, Hadamard: “ It is obvious that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas …the Latin verb cogito ( I think) etymologically means ‘shake together’.

Triggering this synthesis comes about by one of two contrasting paths –“ more or less conscious, logical reasoning or, at the other end, sudden insights which seem to emerge spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious.”

And – central to our ‘arts/science’ theme …” the same polarity of logic and intuition prevails in the methods and techniques of artistic creation”. Hence the contrasting ‘ninety per cent perspiration, ten per cent inspiration’  (Bernard Shaw)   and ‘ je ne cherche pas, je trouve’ –I do not seek, I find’  ( Picasso).
Could this ‘polarity’ also influence in some way our assessments of their relative value and esteem?

Oddly, it was the normally commonsense Guardian which seemed ready quite recently to extend the cult of scientific personality to the borders of Olympus, with its glossy “The Gods of Science” ( Guardian Weekend 11.09.10).  I suspect that the title was as much an embarrassment to their chosen pantheon as to the reader; but revealing and ‘of its time’ in that three of their chosen four very impressive men of science ( no women are apparently yet up for deification?)  are more widely recogniseable as outstanding TV personalities and ‘popularisers of science’ than cutting edge practitioners. Important, no doubt, but for very different reasons.

Still, I’m sure Richard Dawkins will have relished the special irony of being mistaken for a delusory god!

In matters divine, of course, as with the sanctification processes of the Catholic church, it helps to be dead. The 2009 year-long celebrations of Darwin’s bi-centenary showed the more credible face of this very human phenomenon; elevating him to a more plausible - if metaphorical – pantheon alongside Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein and other indisputable, past Greats of science.

The Past, however, still retains plenty of scope for revisionism and retrospective reappraisal of relative merit amongst science’s long dead.

A major recent example of this is Fritjof Capra’s 2010 polemic on ‘Learning from Leonardo’, based on his lectures at the Center for Ecoliteracy’s seminar on ‘Sustainability Education: Connecting Art, Science and Design’.
( http://www. ecoliteracy .org/essays/learning-leonardo)

Capra opens with the claim that “ when it comes to connecting art, science and design, there can be no better inspiration than Leonardo da Vinci.” That he is the true Zeus to the scientific Olympus has so far been denied “ because we have mis-viewed his scientific work through Newtonian mechanistic lenses”.

This has prevented a proper understanding of the essential nature of Leonardo’s approach, which is that “ of a science of organic forms, of qualities, that is radically different from the mechanistic science of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. And this is why Leonardo’s science is so relevant today, especially for education, as we are trying to see the world as an integrated whole, making a perceptual shift from the parts to the whole, objects to relationships, quantities to qualities.”

He clearly nominates Leonardo rather than Galileo as the more appropriate ‘father to modern science’ and wonders how Western scientific thought might have better developed towards where we are, had Leonardo’s notebooks been retrieved and studied more quickly at his death.

He has a point: Leonardo’s attitude of appreciation and respect for nature was based “ on a philosophical stance that does not view humans as standing aside from the rest of the living world … but embedded in , and dependent on, the entire community of life in the biosphere”.

This is a cogent and highly relevant advocacy, but does not require more specious reallocation of celebrity seats in the pseudo- pantheon. Leonardo remains in the thick of it, alongside many another past and present, great and not- so- great, battler for organic knowledge and better things.He would, no doubt,now have a well-thumbed copy of Denis Noble’s ‘The Music of Life’ in his back pocket.

I don’t think he would care a damn for who’s won the Science/Arts Celebrity Knockout.

Ralph Windle.