Two Themes on Science Vs Art

Posted on October 18, 2011

If religion vs science is one eternal debate, science vs art is another. We are taught to differentiate art from science right from the start. We know it in our own bones. Art is soft, science is hard. This image from flickr captures the distinction nicely (courtesy theps.net).

The smart ones and the boys headed in one direction and the not-so-smart ones headed into art. Even today, I’ve encountered plenty of folks who consider themselves arty and curl their noses up at the mention of that dirty word, science. I didn’t understand this at all. There is a science in art and an art in science. And nowhere was this more apparent than in a relatively immature field that I chose as my (a)vocation, computer science.

Science Vs Improv

This past weekend, I ran into two blog posts that talked of this difference in ways I had not considered before. The first was in the blog, Mind Hacks written by Vaughn Bell. In a review of a book by Randy Olson, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist: Talking Substance In An Age of Style”, the post contrasts the the practice of science with the practice of the art form, improv. Improv is an acting technique that relies on spontaneity. I had gone to see a two hour Improv play a few years back. A group of actors came on stage and asked the audience for some words. They used those words to enact a drama on the spot, completely spontaneous, the narrative made up as the scene unfolded. They were superb and I left the room in thrall with the performance. A friend who had invited me to the play said that the key to being good at Imrov is to listen to what the other person says. That enables you to build on the narrative. If you’re stuck trying to come up with better lines than the other people or are not paying close attention and instead unfolding a wholly different narrative in your head, then the whole play comes apart.

Vaughn Bell says something similar in his blog posting. He writes:
“An essential – some would say the essential – of improv is to avoid negating your fellow improvisers suggestions. Whatever happens, improvisers are taught to accept and build – using a “yes and” mindset instead of a “no but” one. This lends itself to humour and creativity.“

Contrast that with this section from what Randy Olson says in the book about the practice of science:
“The entire profession of science has at its core a single word, and that word is “no”. Science is a process not of affirming ideas but of attempting to falsify ideas in the search for truth. This is what a hypothesis is – an idea that can be tested and possibly falsified and rejected. When you give a scientist a paper, he or she reads it with the assumption that the writer is guilty of being wrong until proven innocent. The writers proves his or her innocence by either presenting data or citing sources. With each statement made in the paper, the scientist reading it says “I’m not sure I believe this.” As the author presents graphs and tables of data and cites sources, the good critical scientist attempts to falsify what is being said.

Eventually, after the scientist has examined the data, looked up the cited sources and found that in fact, despite considerable effort, the hypothesis presented cannot be falsfied – only then does the scientist finally start to relax and a bit and say, “Well, okay, I think I can probably live with this.”

Tough buisness. It really is.“

Randy Olson recommends science communicators to practice improv to help improve their skills in communicating scientific ideas. Why ? He writes in an article over at the New Scientist magazine website:
“Scientists are instilled with a dreaded fear of wrongness. To say something wrong as a scientist is to not be a scientist at all.

The fear is justified at scientific meetings, but when you’re talking to the general public, it’s a different arena. You’re at the introductory level of knowledge. Relax. Trust yourself. Your audience can sense the fear, and they don’t like it.

There’s a way for scientists to deal with this. It’s called improv acting. Improv teaches you to relax, be “in the moment”, to “get out of your head”, to be more spontaneous – all things that the general public responds to.

As a scientist you are trained to know your field, then be authoritative and give lectures. While lip service is paid to the idea of listening to feedback and interacting, the truth is that the intensity of scientific research can lead to a tendency to want to plan and control everything (isn’t that what controlled experiments are all about?).

That’s fine in the laboratory, but when it comes to speaking to the public, an overly controlling tendency can be off-putting. Improv leads you in the opposite direction.“

It is not just in science alone, but in engineering too. Recently, I came up with the seeds of an idea in the area that I’m working on. I thought that showing the lay of the land and showing just a little what was possible, people would tune in and understand the power of the idea. But, in meeting after meeting, execs and marketing folks kept asking me what the vision was, what the story was that could be sold to the customers. I eventually managed to deliver convincing presentations, learning in the process that communication is as important as cultivation of an idea.

Certainties In Science And Art

The second perspective on science vs art comes from “Knocking On Heaven’s Door”, the latest book by the famous physicist and popular science author, Lisa Randall. In an excerpt from the book that I came across over at the Science blogs on the Wired magazine website, Lisa Randall writes:
“Among the many reasons I chose to pursue physics was the desire to do something that would have a permanent impact. If I was going to invest so much time, energy, and commitment, I wanted it to be for something with a claim to longevity and truth. Like most people, I thought of scientific advances as ideas that stand the test of time.

My friend Anna Christina Büchmann studied English in college while I majored in physics. Ironically, she studied literature for the same reason that drew me to math and science. She loved the way an insightful story lasts for centuries. When discussing Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones with her many years later, I learned that the edition I had read and thoroughly enjoyed was the one she helped annotate when she was in graduate school.

Tom Jones was published 250 years ago, yet its themes and wit resonate to this day. During my ﬁrst visit to Japan, I read the far older Tale of Genji and marveled at its characters’ immediacy too, despite the thousand years that have elapsed since Murasaki Shikibu wrote about them. Homer created Odyssey roughly 2,000 years earlier. Yet notwithstanding its very different age and context, we continue to relish the tale of Odysseus’s journey and its timeless descriptions of human nature.

Scientists rarely read such old — let alone ancient — scientific texts. We usually leave that to historians and literary critics.“

And it is the certainty that underlies this permanence that scientists balk at. When creationsists want evolution to be taught as a “theory”, they don’t understand that all of science is about theories. It is the efficacy of its prediction that makes a theory tick. As Randall writes:
“The universe evolves and so does our scientific knowledge of it. Over time, scientists peel away layers of reality to expose what lies beneath the surface. We broaden and enrich our understanding as we probe increasingly remote scales. Knowledge advances and the unexplored region recedes when we reach these difficult-to-access distances. Scientific “beliefs” then evolve in accordance with our expanded knowledge.“

The way literature captures certain essential truths which scientists are only now concluding has been captured in books such as “Proust Was a Neuroscientist“.