The Art of Science. ☮ We all are familiar with the brainless argument between art and science. It is brainless in the same manner as when someone drones endlessly about Nature vs. Nurture debates, without realizing that they both at depth, are one and the same as phenomena go. For example, the yolk does interact with the temperature and composition of its immediate external environment as it lays down the cables within its embryonic interiors. For another example, the natural selection that drives gene to propagate gene totally takes place in the context of a delicate feedback loop in a dance to death with its surroundings. Yesterday, a friend dropped by and quickly grabbed my attention away from the drawing I was doing, just as I was about to add a science-equation flourish to it. He wanted my take on an ancient manuscript. We realized we were looking at a disease. While listing out the symptoms and laying out other families of disease, we randomly noticed a spike in Barr-Epstein virus in certain populations we hadnt seen before. He knew the exact percentages to plug in as his whole job was vivisecting bodies of various groups. Various groups because I knew me my skull morphology and also the existence of another place on the eastern seaboard of China where a similar spike could be found. Connecting the both, we had us a decent theory* - one that would have totally bypassed the compartmentalized myopia of modern research - that like a stubborn virus, attends the kind of false dichotomies the first paragraph references. *[One that we might publish first here for our members once the data checks in.] Inevitably, in such moments, a person at the next table would see us scribbling and yakking, to ask the inevitable question that Im sure many of you are familiar with. To answer polymath, always felt like a cop-out to me as it explained nothing. Ability in fields as eclectic/diverse as linguistics, art, science etc. required a better explanation than just a nameless description of a mutant collective noun. I, for example, know no distinction between various fields of study, as it all comes down to something as simple as > patterns in the void. And recognizing them. Now this requires an ability to not just identify, but visually match an eroded inscriptions ancient consonants and vowels to the templates of any number of extinct and extant alphabets one has knowledge of. And this would include some knowledge of All language systems, including non-phonetic ones so as not to trudge down blind labyrinths full of knotted strings. The brain works the way, for us at least, in the way John Nash (as played by Russell Crowe) is erroneously represented cracking codes in A Beautiful Mind [2001]. (Erroneous because Nashs hallucinations were auditory). I would also need a thorough knowledge of comparative philology, linguistics and etymology, among other specialized fields. A considerable proportion of these sciences, you will note falls under the arts; and are often listed as softie sciences. Hardly. In fact, a physicist is no different from say, a toilet cleaner assigned to cubicle A. In that, like any schooled ape tied to a vocation, it just has to execute a fixed task in a compartmentalized field, to say, pay bills. There is none of that romantic brouhaha or creative chutzpah that the term physicist evokes in the form of a toga-clad Greek sticking Renaissance fingers at the sky or in all those embarrassing memes certain other web-pages generate, comparing the arts and sciences, pooh-poohing one over the other. A neurosurgeon would typically require more skill, including having to memorize oodles of all that Latin terminology for minute parts of the body you never knew you had. A good knowledge of other fields including psychology, and even a steady hand & eye (ie. powers of observation) come in. I often come across research put out by lab-coat wearing mice who are not able to reach across (much less, transcend) disciplines and the naivete shows. When that modern mystery of a Malaysian plane MH 370 disappeared from the sky, police reports of 2 Asian-looking men who had boarded with illegal passports surfaced. This in a country full of people who would fall under that category *. Clearly it helped no one narrow anything down anywhere. The police were simply following what the scientistas were themselves putting out there, with research papers with stupid titles like Higher diabetes percentages seen in Asians blabla.. Because apparently they could not tell to differentiate between 2 billion people/ they wanted to be politically correct and not use terms like Mongolid or Oriental/ Their myopia in not being able to reach past molecules, to a wider world limits the world they can describe unto themselves. **[The 2 were Iranians (which is not the Middle East if you wish to split hairs) and consequently Caucasoids, far from looking like Chairman Mao. The only Caucasoid component of Malaysias populations are its Indian minorities] We all (or many amongst the page members) have specialized tasks in science, that we do for a job, either by accident, hobby, choice or design. The person who approached me was a histo-cytopathologist. He was not a virologist by trade, for all his interest in it. When I was drawing, I wasnt drawing what you would by walking off the streets. A detailed knowledge of the anatomy & plasticity of the hand goes into it. I can remember and visualize where every stroke goes. Its almost like laying down equations to balance the left and right side terms. Granted, the blithering vacuous idiocy of much modern art, a long list of embarrassing psyche majors, scores of political science graduates who have little knowledge of politics or science for most of their lives and popular hipster sentiment have left the arts faculty with the assumed stain of requiring less skill and analytical ability than people who grok science departments. The specialized crafts of science took place in modern times. Just as Einstein, as wild-haired professor with foreign accent is a meme that sprang like a wild bush & landed in a time-travelling DeLorean last century. Much of the genius breakthroughs that underpin modern thought took place among natural philosophers who crossed multiple disciplines, with much discipline I might add. Think Schrödingers What is Life? to Watson & Cricks double helix to Dalis Hypercubus. But mostly, think. Because when you recognize patterns in the void at a certain level, you transcend the simple definitions, that prevent mastery of the craft. At that level, the beautiful thoughts of our falling apple become Saturns rings and those rings become the outer rims of galaxies. You leave Einsteins lift of falling objects and extend the principle of equivalence to all of the cosmos. At that level, you leave the clutter, and everything appears through the veil of perception, infinite, mind-bending and majestic. Its not science Or art, stupid. Its both. And then some. © An article on artists & structurally different brains. bbc/news/science-environment-26925271
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 13:54:36 +0000
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