These ideas collected here have been shared by many people. The artist Luke Jerram, for example, said: “scientists and artists begin to ask similar questions about the natural world, ending with completely different answers” (Boustead, 2009). Lisa Randall, a physicist and composer at Harvard, said that a similar curiosity pushes both artists and scientists: «I met many other people in creative fields, and it is interesting to see how they handle the same things: feel that something is missing, what else is there to do, to know »(Cline, 2009). Anne Goodyear, curator of the Smithsonian, commented in her thesis on the intersection of art, science and technology: “the same kind of imagination that allowed Michelangelo to create the supreme achievement of his era helped NASA engineers build their lunar ships »(Goodyear, 2002). John Latham, principal investigator of the National Center for Atmospheric Research sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and professor emeritus of the University of Manchester, an award-winning playwright also, novelist and poet, a man of the “Neo-Renaissance”), wrote :
«I have many friends who are creative artists. They are often surprised, at first, if I suggest that scientific research has much in common with poetry writing or painting. However, on both sides of the division there is an idea, an objective and techniques to achieve it. It is often a tortuous journey, with dead ends and fog. And the goal may change as we get closer »(Hauser, 2010).
Researchers Robert and Michelle Root-Bernstein, in their book “Sparks of Genius”, offer us a deep look at the skills and lifestyles of successful people in the arts, humanities, sciences and technology to understand what it does. that think creatively, innovate and succeed inside, and even outside, of their disciplines. They discovered that those people who had been the subject of their study, both “artists like Picasso or physicists like Richard Feynman,” exhibited the same set of imaginative skills.
That said, there is always a need to find the right balance in combination with profound disciplinary experience. Our reflection today is not intended to argue whether there are only superficial differences between the arts and sciences, as there are important features, methodologies and lines of questions – that are intrinsic and exclusive to each discipline – that must be recognized, appreciated and respected. However, disciplinary straitjackets, that is, the imposition of a rigid thought about what is or is not a discipline, can lead to unnecessary misunderstandings and limitations:
“The worst and deepest stereotypes generate a particularly strong gap between art (seen as an ineffably” creative “activity, based on personal idiosyncrasy and subject only to hermeneutic interpretation) and science (seen as a universal and rational enterprise, based on factual and analytical coherence affirmation) »(Shearer and Gould, 1999).
The ideas we want to share with you, are only an attempt to get away from a simplistic binary grouping of activities and reasoning, thus approaching the concept of the museums of the future, those where art informs about science and this about art.
