Hi Ray, I've been trying to think how to answer your latest in a simple way. And writing that, I suppose, explains the difference in our approach -- whereas you enlarge, I'm always looking for what may be the crux of any problem.
One sentence you wrote probably summarises the difference best. <<<< Science works through diminution while art works through expansion. >>>> Apart from suggesting that your choice of "diminution" is pejorative -- hopefully, you'll agree with me to call it "simplification" instead -- I would agree with what you've written. But this doesn't mean that the motivations of scientists are inferior to -- or even essentially different from -- the artists of the past. All of them have been engaged in trying to portray the wonders of the world in which they found themselves. For most of the millenia of history the greatest minds were both artist and scientist -- what we'd now call polymaths (and who, these days, are becoming rarer and rarer). But, once the importance of the experimental method as enunciated by Francis Bacon in the 16th century became more widely accepted, then the arts and the sciences started to diverge seriously. The paradox about science is that while it has been researching more and more phenomena over the past four centuries it has been increasingly successful in explaining these with an ever-decreasing number of equations using hardly more than half-a-dozen significant numbers. These numbers are not man-made but absolutely basic features of the universe and they do not have (man-made) dimensions to describe them. One of them, for example, is the ratio of the strength of electrical forces to gravitational forces. If any of these numbers were even slightly different from what they are then the universe as we know it simply would not exist. That's the way the cookie's crumbled and you can't blame science for this. On the other hand (in my view), as science succeeded -- particularly in the course of the last century -- artists have become increasingly desperate to retain the ascendancy they used to have. The result is that, today, the arts are rather more used as status symbols by an affluent middle class (the "chattering class") than being genuinely appreciated and cherished. They have lost credibility in the eyes of the population at large. I think that this fashionable manipulation of the arts is unfortunate and will die away in due course and then we might start to see less enmity and more dialogue between the natural scientists on one side of the divide and the artistic intellectuals on the other. Keith __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
