The two articles on art and science attempt to do something revolutionary: to combine art and science into one genre. We’ve always categorized art and science as distinct, and even opposing fields to pursue. Part of this is because the English language distinguishes the two disciplines into two separate words. However, these articles have the power to change our view of this into thinking that our perception of the world is actually a conglomerate of the art and science we see. Art can provide scientific hypotheses, and science can be displayed as a work of art understandable to many people, as Jonathon Wells does.
There are numerous examples one can come up with of art used in science and science used in art. The articles provide a few of them, such as the “Brainbow” picture, the building of beautiful structures such as the pyramids, or depicting geology through a photographic artform, as Jonathon Wells does. I can even come up with several examples myself. Editing my videos requires the use of software designed by programming scientists. Textbooks contain colored pictures of the human body to allow us to differentiate between different organs. Drama therapy and music therapy are up and coming methods of treatment for psychological disorders. Even arts such as acting and stand-up comedy can be boiled down to a science. Constantin Stanislavski came up with a hugely successful method for training actors, and stand-up comedians arrange their jokes in a certain order to generate the most laughs from the audience.
But the most profound statement is made by Jeffrey Lichtman, who blurs the lines of science and art when he explains that our perception of the world is inaccurate. We only understand the world through the filter of our brain’s processing. Color’s don’t actually exist. We just see color because our brains filter wavelengths of light into distinct colors that it perceives. How am I to know that my red is the same as your red? We have methods of testing for colorblindness, but our language and our scientific method fails to test our perception. Even if a friend of mine can perceive a full range of colors, I’ll never know if he perceives red the way I perceive green, and he might perceive blue the way I perceive brown. Therefore, even science isn’t completely based on reality. What is reality? Perhaps art and science are just two different methods of trying to make sense of reality.
This discussion of perception is a philosophical one, and is explained very well by Michael Stevens’ videos on his YouTube channel, Vsauce:
