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

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

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet? How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Pablo Picasso. Quoted in Russell Martin’s ‘Picasso’s War’

“The commonalities of creative thinking, and the psychology of mental drive and excitement, seem to transcend the log ical differences of subject or approach.”

Stephen Jay Gould   The Hedgehog, The Fox and the  Magister’s   Pox. 2003
                              


“ Arts research needs to change direction, to look outwards, and investigate the audience not the texts. It needs to link up with sociology and psychology and public health, and create a body of knowledge about what the arts actually do to people. Until that happens, we cannot even pretend that we are taking the arts seriously.”

John Carey. ‘ What Good Are The Arts? ‘ Faber and Faber. 2005

‘DNA Mania and the Problems with Genetic Determinism’

“ The genome needs to be read through the phenotype, not the other way round.
We have become transfixed by the great success in explaining protein sequences in terms of encoded DNA sequences. This is a great achievement ……… but the original question in genetics was not what makes a protein but rather ‘ what makes a dog a dog, a man a man’. It is the phenotype that stands in need of explanation. It is not just a soup of proteins.”

Denis Noble. ‘The Music of Life – Biology Beyond the Genome ‘
Oxford University Press. 2006

“What is more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the ‘ scientific revolution ‘ coincides with the development of the telescope and the microscope !.

John Gribbin. ‘ Science: A History’ Penguin Books. 2002

“ We have an appetite for wonder, a poetic appetite, which real science ought to be feeding but which is being hijacked, often for monetary gain, by purveyors of superstition, the paranormal and astrology”.

Richard Dawkins. ‘Unweaving The Rainbow’ Penguin Books. 1998

“ The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is ‘Where do you teach?’ The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It’s just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform to institutional ones …….One might even say that outside the classroom – where society demands that the two groups interact – poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms…”

Dana Gioia. US poet and critic. Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts.
‘Can Poetry Matter?’ Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, USA . 1991

 

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