Artistically Scientific

Being an engineering student, I've studied math, physics, and chemistry all (eighteen years?) of my life. These three subjects teach you that everything that happens has a reason. They mould your thinking to be logical and analytic. You begin questioning things, you begin looking for answers - finally you can satisfactorily explain why the sky is blue. You see patterns and order within chaos and that's pretty awesome.

But on the flip side, people believe that it's easy for people like me to forget about perspective, to forget about how there isn't just a single answer, to let go of logic and just go with the flow.

Is it really? Is it so when the most important phase of testing a software is before it is even made - understanding the problem itself? Light is both a particle and a wave - both answers are correct. Quantum mechanics speaks of things which aren't intuitive at all and challenges what we already know today (in which case, you kind of do need to let go of 'logic').

While science is based on facts, arts is on imagination, observation and debates. Poetry and prose can be interpreted in multiple ways, and all those interpretations could be correct. An artist could imagine and paint something that doesn't even exist. A dancer could make you feel over the moon and change that to sadness within seconds, whereas a lawyer has the ability to make something false appear true. There are no laws to be followed, no postulates or axioms.

But you need grace, and an understanding of how to shift moods with movements to be an exemplary dancer. Reasoning and conviction is needed to come up with a false proof. Technique along with colour theory is needed to paint. Although driven by emotion, arts have an equally technical side people must master before adding their own style to what they do.

The debate between science and arts will keep going on but I believe they're more connected than we think, at least at the elemental level. The biggest similarity between an artist and scientist would be how they observe, learn and perform. A scientist observes natural phenomena, an artist would observe human behavior or work done by others. The imagination, observation and debates are what lead to scientific theories and facts in the first place. Secondly, they don't fear the unknown. They don't mind experimenting in their own domain and put their findings forward to the whole world!

Our professions may seem to be poles apart, but at the core level they're all the same, aren't they?

I'd love to know what you think!

Kanksha :)