Nail Polish Everywhere

Her nail polish flew everywhere as her boyfriend slammed on the brakes of his GTO. The car stopped from 60 miles per hour in 3.0 seconds, with a deceleration of 29 feet per second squared, altering the nail polish bottle’s local gravity by 42.3 degrees. Art and science. Both describe our world. Is one better than the other?

Whether it’s literature, sculpture, music, paintings, or theater, art gives us a way to interpret, communicate, and appreciate the world around us. It can be explicit or entirely abstract, but almost always reaches into our emotions. Meanwhile, science, engineering, and math are characterized by their adherence to strict principles, and are usually associated with thought and reasoning in a quantitative realm. The contrast is painted in the first two sentences of this blog. 

Form follows function. — Louis H. Sullivan

One could reasonably divide the two between heart and head, or between right brain and left brain, but the lines between the emotional realm of art, and the quantitative realms of science, math, and engineering are blurry. Our world holds endless examples of artistry in engineering. Consider the Golden Gate Bridge, the iPhone, or a beautiful sailboat. And for those familiar with them, even science, math, and computer programming, have plenty of room to express things with art. The structure of an equation like F = ma is beautiful and artful in its simplicity. 

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

This brings us to an essential point about all of the disciplines, which is the beauty of simplicity. Blaise Pascal said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Whether it’s writing a novel, or designing the next piece of Wow! technology, the process of iteration and editing is much the same. The first thing that comes out is usually inferior. The great artists, writers, mathematicians, engineers, and architects all know this. They are driven by a dissatisfaction of unfinished work, and have to keep going until they get the product they are seeking.

In the end, the disciplines aren’t that different, and the approaches quite similar. The rules may be more rigid in the STEM part of STEAM, and they may be appealing more to the quantitative side of our thinking than the emotional side, but they all involve creativity. Both are needed for us to be whole and complete.