Richard Dawkins begins his book Unweaving the Rainbow by explaining the title, taken from Lamia by Keats. Dawkins suggests that Keats believed Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours, inferring an incompatibility between the arts and science. Dawkins argues the opposite and talks of the beauty in the scientific process:
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.”[1]
In an interview with the BBC in 1981, Richard Feynman speaks of a conversation he had with an artist:
“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimetre; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colours in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”[2]
Art and science are two things which occupy me. The objects in art and the physical manifestations of knowledge in science—research papers, books, videos, lectures—are both reflections of nature. The format of science prioritises clarity, precision, and practicality, but it can also be said to come from a similar place to art—a creative instinct and a yearning for truth.
[1] Dawkins, R. (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Penguin.
[2] Feynman, R. (1981). Horizon. London: BBC.