At the Arts ⁄ Science Interface
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- ‘ EAVESDROPPING ON SCIENCE’: TURNER ACCUSED.
- SCIENCES CIVIL WARS: SEND IN THE PHILOSOPHERS
- WELCOME SERENDIPITY
- GOOGLE’S CHAIRMAN ARGUES CVN’s CASE
- WHICH WAY TO HAPPINESS ?
- EYES and EARS OF THE BEHOLDER
- CELEBRITIES of SCIENCE
- LANGUAGE, TRUTH and LOGIC
- ENGINEERS’ CORNER
- CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the TRIPLE KIND.
- OUT of AFRICA … THE STORY of YOU…
- ARTS/SCIENCE ‘ENCOUNTERS’: a Review
- ARTSCIENCE: ON THE 2010 AGENDA
- Upon a Peak in Darien… New Vistas from Old Places
- CP Snow: Only Connect
- Whose Rise and Fall …?
- How Many Cultures? CP Snow and the Darwin Legacy
- Creative Break-Through at Sheffield University
- Darwin - Right or Wrong?
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November 10th, 2008
Most Thumbed
We’ve no ambitions to build a massive bibliography of ( largely unread ) books on the Arts/Science topic; we’re looking for the few which seem to have some special insights or persuasive leverage and which – even in a supposedly shrinking world – may have not yet grabbed our attention.
To start things rolling, here are my own current ‘ Most Thumbed ’ volumes suffering visible wear and tear on my bookshelves.
What Good Are The Arts? John Carey Faber and Faber 2005
Science: A History John Gribbin Penguin 2002
Unweaving The Rainbow Richard Dawkins Penguin 1998
Can Poetry Matter? Dana Gioia Graywolf Press 1992
Essays on Poetry and American Culture
The Hedgehog, The Fox Stephen Jay Gould Three Rivers Press 2003
and the Magister’s Pox
Proust Was a Neuro-Scientist John Lehrer Houghton Mifflin 2007
Art Matters John Tusa Methuen 1999
The Music of Life Denis Noble Oxford U.P. 2006
( Biology Beyond the Genome)
The Act of Creation Arthur Koestler Pan Piper 1964
The Heart of Things A C Grayling Orion Books 2006
(Applying Philosophy to
The 21st Century)
Romantic Natural Histories Ed. Ashton Nichols Houghton 2004
Mifflin
Darwin: A Life in Poems Ruth Padel Chatto&Windus 2009
The Two Cultures: A Second CP Snow Cambridge UP 1963
Look
The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes 2008
Essays on Contemporary Ed. Robert Crawford Oxford U.P. 2006
Poetryand Contemporary Science
Ways of Seeing John Berger Penguin 1972
A Little History of the World EH Gombrich Yale University 2008
Press
Experiment: Conversations Ed. Bergit Arends Wellcome Trust:
In Art and Science & Davina Thackara Sciart Project 2003
RW
October 11th, 2008
The Synergy of the Two Mind-Sets
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Ralph Windle has started a new blog. I’d like to welcome him and to feature his work, because I think he’s focused on an important area: creating dialog, innovation, and progress at the intersection of the realms of science and the arts. Both groups (and more; the world doesn’t lend itself to being divided into only two such groups, as classic as that grouping is) have much to offer the vital and urgent challenges we face, and the synergy of the two mindsets and the two sets of approaches could be vital for a number of reasons.
In times such as this, we have to work together to figure out our values and our priorities and to work together on the tough problems we face. I learned that over many years of work: you need to know your objectives, your goals, in order to make good decisions, and you need to involve all the people in the system if you want both a robust decision and a decision people will support. Robert Dugger made that same claim yesterday in a panel discussion called the “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget Forum on Consequences of Federal Intervention in U.S. Markets”
How does Ralph Windle figure into this? He and his Creative Value Network are focused on creating dialog among those in the sciences and the arts to foster innovation and creativity. Check it out, and join in the dialog; perhaps together you and the others can be part of making the world a bit (or maybe even a lot) better.
Bill Harris : ‘ Facilitated Systems’ is a vehicle for applying systemic approches to the solution of complex business and creative problems.
October 10th, 2008
Bridging the Shared Learning Gap
Each of the two cultures seems locked into its own disciplines and methods. What steps could be taken to break down this ‘lock-in’?
Lock-in is a longstanding phenomenon. When Marco Polo returned from China and told of the use of paper money, that paradigm or mental concept was simply too foreign for his own people: only metal money could be real and have value. A mindset that endured well into the next century. Consider your PC keyboard. Its layout was designed in 1873 to slow typing down, because early mechanisms jammed easily. More than 100 years later we use the same keyboard layout. ( Continue reading… )
September 18th, 2008
Provocative Quotes
“Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination.”
Jonah Lehrer. ‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist’. Houghton Mifflin 2007
“Creative synthesis has a basic, bisociative pattern : the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills or matrices of thought.”
(Three case studies : Gutenberg’s invention of printing with moveable types; Kepler’s synthesis of astronomy and physics; Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection).
Arthur Koestler. The Act of Creation. Pan 1964