[PREV - BRIDGE_OF_STARS] [TOP]
January 9, 2006
The history of
attempts at FUSILE_LINK
bridging the two
cultures is And there
not encouraging... have been CONSILIENCE_PRIZE
many of them.
Newton kicked GOLDEN_SPIRIT
Goethe's ass.
"Flaubert the
anti-romantic writes to
Louise Colet: 'The more
Art develops, the more
scientific it will be,
just as science will Literary
become more artistic." realism
The more scientific, the itself
less the personality of an attempt
the artist matters; or at infusing
One of Bruce Sterling's as Flaubert says about art with
more clever short writing _Bovary_: 'No scientific
stories is about a kind lyricism, no comments, values...
of Gonzo Science where the author's personality
personal commentary is absent.'"
no longer forbidden.
-- Wylie Sypher,
A classic paper "Rococo to Cubism
in the genre is in Art and "wily
titled something Literature" (1960) cypher"?
like "My Grand
Fun in Decoding (A book from Fucking
the Lymphatic the free box sixties.
System Regeneration out front of
Mechanism" "Know Knew Books" I bet he
in Palo Alto.) wanted
to write
for
Batman.
Flights of fancy,
poetic license,
conceit...
Run contrary to the
extreme precision demanded
in scientific concepts.
Yes, the theortician can -- even must --
follow leaps of intuition, but if
these can not be brought back home,
grounded in the minutiae of observation
and calculation, then the theory is
abandoned.
Science is not without
the creative impulse.
Perhaps it's the humanities
that's lacking? It has no There's no way
effective catabolism. for the flight
of fancy to The poet may
No way to be wrong, run aground. always make
means no way to be right. both choices.
So: the integration,
the "consilience" can not
be concilitory?
The humanities must surrender
to scientific rigor, to be
reborn?
Or could it be that the technical
is also in need of some assault...
An embrace of serendipity,
A greater respect for intuition?
Need for a sense of ethics,
a "social conscience",
is an oft made claim, but
that notion has been around
long enough for us to see
problems with it. Currently, many fear that
environmental scientists
The corruption of objectivity, are themselves fear-mongering...
(or any approximation of it).
There have been too many
cases of exaggeration,
attempts at manipulating
the masses into doing
the right thing.
So the scientists
are not trusted Oil company
to be scientific. PR flacks
are awarded
equivalent
credibility...
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