Realism and creativity
Art and science are tied to reality in different ways, as are artists and scientists.
Some time ago, our photographer attended a show of photographs of garden landscapes. While admiring one example he found himself standing next to a woman who commented, “That tree should be over there. It would make it a much better picture.” She was a painter, and painters are free to move trees around in their paintings if they desire. Photographers are not. That statement should be qualified, in these days of Photoshop, when photographers can indeed move trees around; but doing it seamlessly and convincingly is hard. At any rate, a photographer has to start with the scene that is present, while a painter can take from it what ideas and ingredients seem interesting and manipulate them at will.
That could serve as a distinguishing mark between art and science. The task of science is to investigate what is, while art seeks to create what is not (yet); the scientist cannot force the world to conform to some idea of his, while the artist must have the creativity to do something that hasn’t been done before.
Like all simple generalizations, this is too simple to be true. Some photographers are artists, even though they would never move a tree. There is a creativity in seeing a picture in a scene, in the basic choice of tripping the shutter. There is even more in the small manipulations that emphasize certain elements and create a mood, even though the image remains totally realistic. And painters must start with the world as we see it, in order for their works to be intelligible.
(We should probably except those painters who are entirely abstract. Though somehow their effects must be connected with real things that we have seen. . . but that subject lies too far from our expertise.)
We are on firmer ground in asserting that scientists must be tied closely to reality; indeed, it’s the standard that makes science different from other intellectual activity. Observations must be as objective as possible, reflecting a minimum of bias about what should be or what we might want to be. But there is a similar sort of creativity as in a realistic photographer: the choice of what to investigate, and how, is analogous to the choice of what to photograph, and how.
And further, there is the process of originating a theory. It may be local and limited, or general and immense in implications; somehow an idea is created that was not there before. We don’t know how it happens. The mysterious process of scientific creativity may explain why scientists read so many biographies of scientists. How did Dr. X come up with his theory of Y? And how can I do something similar? In a field in which personality is not supposed to matter, in which electrons do the same thing no matter who flicks the switch, this is the place where individuals count.
Art and science are different; they have different aims and meet different standards; but they share many features, different facets of the same jewel.
