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Reproduced from the
Forty years ago,on 7 May 1959,the distinguished scientists and
novelist CP Snow
delivered a lecture that caused a famous stir.
He pointed out the growing chasm between the world of art and the world of
science that he described as the Two Cultures [Ref: "The World Treasury of
Physics,Astronomy and Mathematics" CP Snow "The Two Cultures" p741;Davis
& Hersh "The Mathematical Experience" p50/60 {The Individual and the
Culture}]. He saw a profound alienation between the two.
Rare then as now, he was one of the few great men of his day to span the
divide. In his speech he suggested science would be the inevitable winner
because science was providing all the
answers.Two
Cultures (to be shown on Sunday
16 May on C4) revisits some of Snow' s ideas but with a very modern eye and
a rather different conclusion.[Ref: Video: OB4]
Nowadays you might find fewer people with Snow's absolute confidence in science
as our saviour. We have seen science lead us the wrong way too often since
then. Splitting the atom never delivered a benefit commensurate with its
threat. BSE showed that scientists who mock nature
interfere with the natural food chain at our peril. We have been to the Moon
at vast expense and it hasn't made much difference. New technology is
accelerating at a pace where most of us can't keep up.Instead of liberating
us for more leisure, it has made it possible and therefore inevitable that
one person does the job of three.We may be grateful for the internet and
mobile phones, but at the same time we are mightily more sceptical about
science than in CP Snow's day.
The Channel 4 film tries to span the two worlds by suggesting that there
is really not much difference between art and science. Both explore the world
around us, both try to find deep reasons and meanings art asks how and science
why [Do they? -LB]. If, 40 years ago, art was regarded as an irrelevant add-on,
that's changed. Increasingly now ordinary people, not just elites, regard
art as a central part of human life, the spiritual element that once was
filled by religion. In the film people express their feelings about the pictures
they have chosen for their sitting-room walls: reproductions of Constable's
Corn Field or Turner's Fighting Temeraire.People who live near
to Anthony Gormley's triumphant Angel of the North iron sculpture
in Gateshead describe how much it means to them, despite their first doubts.
So has art won? The somewhat dubious theme of this elegant and charming film
is that art and science are converging. The more scientists discover about
the brain, the more they understand about our appreciation of art. This rapidly
descends into the kind of neo-Darwinist determinism
that I find particularly repugnant, where every human feeling is reduced
to its most utilitarian. According to this doctrine, as primitive creatures
surviving in the wild we became programmed by our experience of nature to
feel anxiety and alarm when we see red, reminding us of blood: we love blues
and greens that echo the water, sky and grass of a safe environment. Our
brains are programmed to like certain shapes, patterns and compositions,
though here scientists don't know why or how.
The most truly fascinating revelation comes from an experiment to discover
whether ordinary people can tell the difference between good art bad art.
A large group of people, not art experts, were asked to look at 75 different
pairs paintings by the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian, whose hallmark style
was abstract black lines and boxes on a white background, with the occasional
yellow or red box. Each pair had a genuine Mondrian next to a slightly modified
one, with the proportions subtly changed.
Asked to identify the genuine from the altered, three-quarters of the time
the group got the answer right. Why? No one could say, but
clearly the brain has a sense of correct,
pleasing proportion that a good artist instinctively understands. All
those who say abstract art is just a random accident are proved wrong
scientifically, supporting the idea that we are all hard-wired to appreciate
art and that art is not just a part of our spirit and emotions. [This has
to do with PHI or the golden mean and the recursive
nature of Fractals -LB ]
Otherwise, it seems to me CP Snow's observations hold good art and science
remain worlds apart.It starts at school, where the two groups divide at a
young age. To be sure there are some high scientific thinkers also immersed
in the arts, but they are mainly the geniuses at the top, the abstract thinkers
whose ideas reach to the realms of philosophy as an art. Otherwise the people
who look for the mysteries of the universe in test tubes and microscopes
live on another planet from those for whom the word, the note or the paintbrush
holds the only true path to the meaning of life. The boffins think the artists
are a little frivolous, living off the hard graft of those whose discoveries
create the comfortable modern way of life that makes the money for art
possible. The artist fraternity for their part look snootily down
on the scientists as dull mechanics, plodders, worthy but lacking the spiritual
dimension without which scientific discovery has no real point.
What's more, I suspect this cultural divide runs so deep that it is passed
on. Families who for generations have been involved in the arts are unable
to communicate enthusiasm or understanding about science to their children.
If their world revolves entirely around the arts,how can they offer more
than a blank look of panic when confronted with their children' s physics
homework? If even one of my four children stepped across the divide and became
scientists, I would be proud of myself as a parent. But I doubt they ever
really had the chance, since the Two Cultures are
so difficult to bridge.
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