11 Comments on “Hidden Structures”   rss feed

1. radosh on Jun 16th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

   As far as I know, there is not yet an algorithm for winning the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.

   Hint: I accept PayPal.

2. Ellipsis on Jun 16th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

   I think many scientists do appreciate the (relative) lack of underlying fully-encompassing theories of art. not everything is, or needs to be, scientific to be worth appreciating. some personal definitions:

   Science answers questions that we want answered.
   Art is what doesn’t answer questions that we don’t want answered.

3. Melina on Jun 16th, 2008 at 8:36 pm

   Reminds me of how excited I was when I read about this research into the fractal nature of Jackson Pollock’s art.

4. Chris W. on Jun 16th, 2008 at 8:40 pm

   In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.

   — Paul Dirac

5. brooks on Jun 17th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

   @Melina–

   i was also blown away by the implications of richard taylor’s fractal analysis of pollock. then, i read this, and was quite a bit disappointed.

6. TimJ on Jun 17th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

   Hi Sean,

   Fairly long time reader, but very rare with commenting… Great topic. I would probably also add that art has a great ability to inspire and motivate. I am very certain that seeing 2001 as a kid planted the seed which later grew into the motivation to go into physics (in spite of having no clue as to what the movie was about when I saw it…I was pretty young at the time). To this day, I can not hear a Strauss waltz without having visions of space stations dance in my head and am reasonably certain this was not Strauss’ intent.

   As to “The Big Bang Theory”, I look forward to your comments. I have come to more or less enjoy the show, due mainly to some of the physics in-jokes and comments. I thought the Doppler-effect Halloween costume was brilliant. Although all through my years in undergraduate and graduate school, everybody I knew was considerably more rounded than the caricatures depicted on the program, they still seem like people I could be comfortable hanging out with now and then. My wife, also a Ph.D. in physics, on the other hand, hates the show. She believes it displays physicists in a stereotypical bad light (which I can not totally disagree with) and that all through her physics career she never knew anybody like any of the characters. I think perhaps a plot twist could be in order, where the love interest, Penny, starts picking up an interest in physics..gets accepted at Caltech, etc. Not sure how one would write a sitcom script for that though..

7. anonymous on Jun 17th, 2008 at 4:26 pm

   Sean: “I have a theory about that.”

   Which is?

   (I can’t read your mind. Yet.)

8. Chris W. on Jun 17th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

   See this interview with mathematician and novelist Manil Suri.

9. Jacob Russell on Jun 17th, 2008 at 9:09 pm

   Thank you for this post. When I was a child in Chicago, a great aunt took me on regular excursions to both the Field and the Museum of Science and Industry… they became almost a dream landscape for me. For years she sent me birthday subscriptions to the Scientific American… when they were less inclined to publish articles written for laymen to understand.

   I was torn. I came from a family of artists… all of whom venerated science. I never understood the conventional ideas of an assumed war between science and the arts… nor between religion and art… but the latter, only because my primary understanding of “religion’ was basically aesthetic, and had little to do with anyone’s theology.

   This last post touched my heart… on the one hand, it’s almost childlike (not childish) naivety… and on the other-you touch on, howsoever crudely, exactly the critical points that are most worth working through.

   Look, I’m in awe of you science guys and gals… and of your effort to bring more gals into the fold. But though it’s way more difficult and uncertain a task to point out who’s gonna last–that is to say–be fertile to the next generation of writers and poets–nonetheless–we still have something, however difficult to define, in common.

   Your almost touchingly naive post…nonetheless gets to the heart of how we talk about judgement in art and literature, what it’s possible to say, and what it’s not–if there is any hope of finding a common language:
   a commitment to a kind of truth… or rather, different angles and viewpoints on that elusive target.

   You are a brave man to cross the line and talk about what we may or may not have in common.

   But then… that’s what I love about CosmicVariance!

   Keep up the good work.. and for Fred’s sake, delete the Trolls without further apology !

10. Penny Penniston on Jun 18th, 2008 at 10:15 am

    Look at any scriptwriting textbook and you’ll find that it’s basically a mechanics textbook. Novelists are writers but scriptwriters are engineers. The vocabulary of our craft is peppered with physics and engineering metaphors. We talk about story structure, character arcs and dramatic tension. We think about internal and external forces acting upon a character. We try to give our plots momentum and our stories power. Some day at some physics conference, I want to do a talk on how to adapt Newton’s Laws of Motion to write a screenplay I’m convinced that I could turn all the scientists into dramatic writers.

11. Jacob Russell on Jun 18th, 2008 at 11:21 pm

    Penny,

    Script writing is prosaody. Versification… but with a more practical rationalization. It’s “how to” component. A script is also a blueprint. Not only, but also.

    Mastery of versification in itself doesn’t get you beyond Halmark Mother’s Day cards.

    “Structure,” goes way beyond versification… into what what was there before the Big Bang… theory built on residual evidence. Science and art are open ended, but in very different ways. Science is open ended, in that any given postulate is tentative, but tentative to an at least theoretical final conclusion. Art has no claim to any such theoretical goal. It’s all contingency.

    Which does NOT mean: ‘it’s all subjective.’ There are always weaker and more robust interpretations and judgments… just that they have no theoretical endpoint.

    Art is not amorphous emoting… it’s a form of thinking… how we think ourselves into being.

    Art without awareness of science… is kitch. Science without awareness of art ?

    You tell me.

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   June 19th, 2008 at 09:19

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