Ask HN: Has art positively impacted your scientific profession?

[unnawut]

I have read some discussions that seem like scientific people, or those whose professions are more inclined towards logical skills, may not appreciate art as much as other. Some are to the level of dismissing art as useless to human civilization altogether. Is art really that dismissal?

Has art impacted your scientific side of your profession in a positive way?

[jamessb]

There are certianly many technical people who are very appreciative of the arts.

Carl Djerassi was a novelist and playwright as well as a very distinguished chemist [1], Stuart Firestein was a theatre director before beginning his career in science [2], and Pietr Hein [3] is famous for his short poems as well as his mathematical pursuits. There are also a large number of medical doctors who are also authors.

There's also a short science fiction story at the end of each issue of Nature [4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Djerassi#Career

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Firestein

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Hein_(scientist)

[4]: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/index.html

[veddox]

I'm not sure I agree with you. In fact, a scientist's analytical thinking may be of great help in understanding the more complex art forms and thus engender a deeper appreciation of said art. Also, scientists are highly educated people and as such often have a strong background in the arts and humanities too. Specifically the "classical arts" tend to be the purview of the upper middle class that most scientists belong to.

(At least that is the situation here in Germany, where our Humboldtian tradition of education places a premium on a well-rounded schooling. Amongst my fellow students - biologists, physicists and such - it is not abnormal to discuss literature or music or philosophy. It is almost expected of an educated person that he or she be able to talk about such topics.)

Speaking personally, I have to say that I find it refreshing and indeed almost necessary to engage in "right-brain activities" every now and then. Few people are entirely logical in their thinking - and art is a wonderful outlet for the emotional side of our being.

[mbrock]

I think of art like Kafka thought about literature:

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

It doesn't seem likely that art is useful in my profession, but is that what it's for?

[veddox]

An impressive quote, but I cannot agree with it fully. Of course it is a very important function of art to shake us up and get us to see the world in a different light. No doubt about that.

But to reduce it to merely this is to ignore what makes art what it is. It ignores the aesthetics, the concept of beauty. The idea that something can have value without having explicit content.

Aesthetics make art a potent tool for transmitting ideas. We are more likely to be influenced by something we sensually enjoy. But it is the aesthetics that make something art, and not the idea. Art can exist without the latter, but not without the former. And that is valid too. Because sometimes, what we really need in this world is just a little bit of beauty.

[mbrock]

Aesthetics is an interesting concept. Romantics thought the sublime was the highest aesthetic and the sublime is terrifying. Bach is kind of terrifying too. Even the works that aren't praising Jesus, the God who bled to death from being murdered by humans.

[indescions_2017]

See this fantastic recent YC podcast with former Artforum EIC Michelle Kuo. Where she talks at length about E.A.T. And collabs between Billy Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Feynman, and Bell Labs engineers curious about experimenting with LSD!

http://blog.ycombinator.com/experiments-in-art-and-technolog...

And for inspiration:

Billy Klüver: Motion of the Electron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK3wnOGPnGs

[framebit]

I transitioned from filmmaking to software engineering (long story) and now paint very seriously in my free time. I think of myself as an artist with a day job. When I come home, I crave the release of my easel. My partner has noticed that when I'm engaged with my art, I'm more relaxed and just "more of a person."

My background in art and storytelling, and particularly in film editing, informs my day job in so many weird ways. Although I feel like an outsider and a total weirdo sometimes in the tech world, I have an intuition and attention to people that many of my colleagues don't have or don't have as keenly. I can tell the story of a project in a really compelling way. I can fit the pieces of a project together in the same way that I can fit the individual shots of a scene together.

On the flip side, computer science has helped me approach my art in a more disciplined manner. It's also opened up a world of digital art to me in a way that would have been unapproachable before I really knew stuff about computers.

I firmly believe that deep study in one concentrated area absolutely informs other areas. Mine happen to be art and computer science, but this could be language and chemistry or philosophy and physics or any number of combinations. I think there's something to the Socratic notion of true forms, and I think immersion in any particular discipline gives you different directions of insight to these forms. Or to God, if you want to give a theological twist to it.

Science and (good) art are both getting at the same thing: truth. They are two different sides of the human experience, pointing at the same thing. I would dare to say that one cannot be a well-rounded person without at least some appreciation or mild interest in the other.

T.S. Elliot was a banker when he started publishing poetry. His wealthy society friends offered to pay him the same salary to write full time, and he turned them down. There have been many other writers and artists who found the discipline, financial security, and routine of their day job necessary to foster their artistic output. I do dream about being able to paint full time, but I wonder if I would be as productive in my art without the daily exercise of, for lack of a better term, my left brain.

[cju_]

Hacker&Painter (Paul Graham) might interest you, he draws a large parallel between art and computer science (along many others topics).

[johnpython]

I don't appreciate or value art at all.