The Science of Art And the Art of Science

As I walks the halls, visit classes, and speak with teachers and students at Crossroads College Prep, I wonder at the frequency with which our artistic students perceive themselves as “bad in science” or how often our scientifically minded students see themselves as not being very creative. While the walls of our school are covered in jaw-dropping pieces of original artwork, the creators of those paintings, photographs, or sculptures all too often see themselves as artsy and fail to understand that the same process of thought that enables them to create that piece of artwork can be just as easily put to use in a lab. Similarly, the students who can do labs perfectly and produce exciting results do not always realize that they are in the process of creating something. While the teachers at Crossroads College Prep do as good of a job as any in teaching that creativity is present in any field, all too often students fail to understand this and they see the arts and the sciences as two sides of a dichotomy.


Reading Richard Holmes’ engaging book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science,, I came across a quotation from the British scientist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) that encapsulates what I have been trying to say for many years,

“The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty: and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.”


As Davy states, one of the ways in which we see our world anew is through the power of analogies. When we apply what we know in one area to another by looking at the applicability of those concepts or process, we are in the process of making something new and different. We begin with what we know and we come to comprehend its relationship to something different. I am reminded often of the story Walter Isaacson tells in his biography of Albert Einstein and his formulation of the theory of relativity. Isaacson describes when the physicist, then living in Bern near the train station and the clock tower and working at the patent office, pondered the nature of time and space. It was Einstein’s ability to take the things he saw in one realm, in this case watching the trains go back and forth in the rail yard and considering the ways that the telegraph office used electrical signals to synchronize clocks within time zones, and apply those images and concepts to another arena, the physics of light and energy, that made him a truly exceptional thinker and scientist. This was an act of artistry as much as it was a function of science.

If we continue to teach our students that the worlds of art and science are mutually exclusive, we will continue to shortchange them as individuals and lose out as a society. We must help them see that they are artists and scientists in everything they do. As Holmes says at the end of his book, “The old rigid debates and boundaries-science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics-are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.”

The Adjacent Possible

Both in a podcast and a recent article, I came across the phrase “the adjacent possible” and being curious, I looked into it more. According to the scientist Stuart Kauffman, the adjacent possible describes the potential of what could be when we combine what we know currently with what is just beyond our immediate knowledge and in the process move toward a higher level of complexity. The writer Steven Johnson discusses the adjacent possible as “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

If you think about it, you realize we know this intuitively. How many times as children do we play on the floor with a variety of toys, put them together, and create something completely new? (Isn’t this a major theme in the Toy Story movies?) Whatever it is we’re making, we’re not devising it entirely out of the ether: we’re taking what we have, looking beyond its apparent possibility, and stretching its limits to the point that we have made something more complicated and potentially more sophisticated.

However, this view of slow, methodical invention where one thing builds on the next or combines with something else does not always correspond with the way we portray genius or creativity. We propagate an image of the lone inventor in his/her lab, slaving away on his/her own, and voila!, creating the next great thing. We look at inspiration as revolutionary rather than as evolutionary, and as a result, we may discourage those who are on the precipice of discovery.

I wonder if we teach students the power and the excitement of the adjacent possible in our schools and in their lives. Children are fully aware of this process of change in their own world, possibly more than ever as they use the web to mix and match and create cultural hybrids. They have no trouble taking the music to which the listen or the movies they watch, combining them with other media, and inventing something entirely new. While youth may have always done this, the ability to merge a variety of formats and produce something different and more complex may be more present than ever.

Is our fear of plagiarism and the failure of our laws to keep up with the changes in the marketplace of ideas preventing us from maximizing this form of creativity? Are we demonstrating to our students that this process of creativity is in fact how the greatest scientists and artists have functioned forever?

In addition, are we shortchanging our students and preventing them from meeting their own adjacent possibilities? We should be helping them see that they are always on the edge of something completely new, something completely different, and something very exciting and more complex. This is what schools can and should do, and we should celebrate the adjacent possible all around us.

To read more about this, check out Steven Johnson’s recent article,
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