"The value of mathematical instruction as a preparation for those more difficult investigations, consists in the applicability not of its doctrines but of its methods. Mathematics will ever remain the past perfect type of the deductive method in general; and the applications of mathematics to the simpler branches of physics furnish the only school in which philosophers can effectually learn the most difficult and important of their art, the employment of the laws of simpler phenomena for explaining and predicting those of the more complex." (John S Mill, "A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive", 1843)
"From that time, the universe has steadily become more complex and less reducible to a central control. With as much obstinacy as though it were human, it has insisted on expanding its parts; with as much elusiveness as though it were feminine, it has evaded the attempt to impose on it a single will. Modern science, like modern art, tends, in practice, to drop the dogma of organic unity. Some of the mediaeval habit of mind survives, but even that is said to be yielding before the daily evidence of increasing and extending complexity. The fault, then, was not in man, if he no longer looked at science or art as an organic whole or as the expression of unity. Unity turned itself into complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction." (Henry Adams, "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres", 1904)
"Science, like art and religion - neither more nor less - is a form of man's reaction against nature. It is an attempt to explain nature in its own terms, that is, to evidence its unity, wholeness, and congruency." (George Sarton, "The History of Science and the New Humanism", 1928)
"Science is neither philosophy, nor religion, nor art; it is the totality of positive knowledge, as closely knit as possible; it is as different from its practical applications on the one hand, as it is from idle theorizing and blind faith on the other. It behooves us to make no extravagant claims for it, and to be as humble as we can."
"[…] the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well-constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production." (Ernest Rutherford, 1932)
"There is a science of simple things, an art of complicated ones. Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science." (Paul Valéry, "Moralités", 1932)
"It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." (Max Planck, "The Philosophy of Physics", 1936)
"Analogy pervades all our thinking, our everyday speech and our trivial conclusions as well as artistic ways of expression and the highest scientific achievements. Analogy is used on very different levels. People often use vague, ambiguous, incomplete, or incompletely clarified analogies, but analogy may reach the level of mathematical precision. All sorts of analogy may play a role in the discovery of the solution and so we should not neglect any sort." (George Pólya, "How to solve it", 1945)
"Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth." (Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1945)
"Unlike art, science is genuinely progressive. Achievement in the fields of research and technology is cumulative; each generation begins at the point where its predecessor left off." (Aldous Huxley, "Science, Liberty and Peace", 1946)
"All art originates in an act of intuition or vision." (Herbert Read, "Form in Modern Poetry", 1948)
"Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)
"Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language." (Werner K Heisenberg, "Physics and Philosophy", 1958)
"The important distinction between science and those other systematizations [i.e., art, philosophy, and theology] is that science is self-testing and self-correcting. Here the essential point of science is respect for objective fact. What is correctly observed must be believed [...] the competent scientist does quite the opposite of the popular stereotype of setting out to prove a theory; he seeks to disprove it. (George G Simpson, "Notes on the Nature of Science", 1962)
"All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors." (Marshall McLuhan, "Culture Is Our Business", 1970)
"If some great mathematicians have known how to give lyrical expression to their enthusiasm for the beauty of their science, nobody has suggested examining it as if it were the object of an art - mathematical art - and consequently the subject of a theory of aesthetics, the aesthetics of mathematics (François Le Lionnais, "Great Currents of Mathematical Thought", 1971)
"There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)
"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." (Isaac Asimov, "The Roving Mind", 1983)
"Literature is as much a product of the technological and scientific milieu as it is of the artistic one. Some of the large ideas, call them theories or metaphors - that humans are machines, that the observer affects the phenomenon observed, that information can be quantified - alter the way work is done in art. Metaphors invented by artists imply new ways of seeing, demolish mere logic, provoke alternatives, and lead to new theories in science." (David Porush, "The Soft Machine", 1985)
"There is an art to science, and science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole." (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)
"Science is (or should be) a precise art. Precise, because data may be taken or theories formulated with a certain amount of accuracy; an art, because putting the information into the most useful form for investigation or for presentation requires a certain amount of creativity and insight." (Patricia H Reiff, "The Use and Misuse of Statistics in Space Physics", Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoelectricity 42, 1990)
"What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity. (Robert Musil", "Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses", 1990)
"Science with all its faults has brought education and the arts to more people - a larger percentage - than has ever existed before science. In that respect it is science that is the great humanizer. And, if we are going to solve the problems that science has brought us, it will be done by science and in no other way." (Isaac Asimov, "Essay 400: A Way of Thinking, "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", 1994)
"[...] in science there are collectors, classifiers, compulsory tidiers-up and permanent contesters, detectives, some artists and many artisans, there are poet-scientists and philosophers and even a few mystics." (Rolf M Zinkernagel, [Nobel lecture] 1996)
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." (Donald E Knuth, [foreword to the book "A=B" by Marko Petkovsek et al] 1996)
"The art of science is knowing which observations to ignore and which are the key to the puzzle." (Edward W Kolb, "Blind Watchers of the Sky", 1996)
"The mystery of sound is mysticism; the harmony of life is religion. The knowledge of vibrations is metaphysics, the analysis of atoms is science, and their harmonious grouping is art. The rhythm of form is poetry, and the rhythm of sound is music. This shows that music is the art of arts and the science of all sciences; and it contains the fountain of all knowledge within itself." (Inayat Khan, "The Mysticism of Sound and Music", 1996)
"The role of science, like that of art, is to blend proximate imagery with more distant meaning, the parts we already understand with those given as new into larger patterns that are coherent enough to be acceptable as truth. Biologists know this relation by intuition during the course of fieldwork, as they struggle to make order out of the infinitely varying patterns of nature." (Edward O Wilson, "In Search of Nature", 1996)
"The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science." (Edward O. Wilson, "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", 1998)
"Science and art, by their very nature, differ in that science can be learned in a systematic and logical way, whereas expertise in art has to be acquired by example, experience, and practice." (Avinash K Dixit & Barry J Nalebuff, "The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life", 2008)
"It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness." (Jonah Lehrer, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist", 2011)
"I think that science may be styled the knowledge of universals, or abstract wisdom; and art is science reduced to practice - or science is reason, and art the mechanism of it - and may be called practical science. Science, in fine, is the theorem, and art the problem." (Laurence Sterne)
"Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable." (Carl G Jung
"Science and art belong to the whole world, and the barriers of nationality vanish before them." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"The sciences and arts are not cast in a mold, but formed and shaped little by little, by repeated handling and polishing, as bears lick their cubs into shape at leisure." (Michel de Montaigne)
"The two forms of experiment, scientific and artistic, share an attitude of detached yet intense observation toward the events precipitated. Yet the two activities are fundamentally opposed. Scientific experiment, relying on empirical rigor in refining its methods and verifying its results, seeks to extend and consolidate our grasp of order in the universe. Artistic experiment sets out to breed disorder, thwart determinism, and open up a space for individual freedom and consciousness." (Roger Shattuck)
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