When Art Becomes Science Becomes Art
There’s a cosmic battle we’ve come to know quite well since the Age of Enlightenment. We are led to believe that every domain started in a crude, brutish form and then inevitably transformed into a measured craft with laws, rules, theories, and hypotheses. We tend to regard this evolution as working towards a kind of “End of History.” We’ve arrived at something better, and that something is SCIENCE.
We even divide professions and studies in college into these camps. “Real scientists” regard economics and psychology and marketing as overeager amateurs. It’s tempting to believe that someday these fields will grow up and become more serious— measurable, provable, facts, facts, facts.
And then we bump into world class chefs, artists, musicians, writers, body builders, designers, managers, speakers, actors, salesmen, comedians, and entrepreneurs. We see craftsmanship and methodology behind their greatness. We see an intense desire to know, to study, to test, to master, to measure, to prove.
When we do not understand the natural order of something, we call it an art. It feels subjective or like magic because we don’t see its structure.
But the cycle continues in every field. Music feels like art until we see the structure of music theory, the science behind sound waves, the math behind chords, until electronic tools come along and create digital instruments that are indistinguishable from real ones. And all of these advancements in science help us push music even further into art, into the unknown strange area we can’t measure and lock down.
But music doesn’t “stay science” and stop being art. Science is like the home base, the firm ground that we stand on. These are the truths that we have statistically significant reason to believe are fact. Occasionally, this ground proves to be less stable than we expected, like with Newton’s laws, Einstein and relativity, Stochastic Calculus, and quantum physics. Key facts in fields such as nutrition science are becoming constantly upended and questioned every year. Medicine is dealing with broken promises and alternate pathways to wellness from other fields.
Art serves as a kind of exploratory vessel. It allows us to use the facts of science to reach further and express ourselves, to extend outside of rigid geometric proofs into a scary land bridge built on assumptions and guesses. It doesn’t require the same kind of tether that keeps us grounded in science. Art gives humans the freedom to find strange corners of the universe and break things. It’s why we build startups and explore other planets and start revolutions that topple governments. Once we are there, science helps us build stability around facts that we can test and prove.
Every day, I see art and science entangled all around us. The startup world has been enthralled with Lean Startup, analytics, and data-driven decision making for the past ~5 years. Kids in elementary and middle school are learning “Big History,” a new academic discipline supported by Bill Gates and others. Culinary science has been taken by storm with Sous Vide and Molecular Gastronomy. Psychologists like Joshua Greene apply evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and game theory to uncover the root of morality in nature.
Art and science truly need each other. It’s not just about STEM education or everyone learning to code. It’s about building intellectual depth and craftsmanship in everything we do. It’s about digging for truth, testing our assumptions, building, measuring, learning, proving, disproving, and then taking these facts and skills and pushing further into the unknown. We are all artists and scientists when we pursue the elusive charm of our curiosities.
