Art and science, can they ever be one and the same?

Extract

As a scientist whose primary passion is art and graphics I have, for as long as I can remember, sought to find a satisfactory bridge between Art and Science. I have invariably found the attempts that I have come across are, at best, unsatisfactory and, at worst, specious. Books purporting to find ‘Art’ in the ‘Sciences’, or vice versa, usually consist of collections of photographs that reveal some previously hidden worlds (often taken by electron microscopes) or elegant images, which are some sort of visual representation of some theoretical/mathematical results. Modern computer-graphics packages have resulted in a plethora of elegant images. But are they art? Maybe, maybe not, perhaps it is just semantics and, anyway, perhaps it does not matter in general. I would have the board from a computer and other elegant flotsam dropped overboard from our technologically advanced world, which produces so much unusable obsolete technology. It is as elegant as a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bridget Riley Op Art creation, but is it art? As always in these cases, I seek not the answer but to understand the question.

The artist Allen Jones contacted me last year about an imaginative idea for the 2004 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in London. The idea that he and David Hockney had come up with, was to organize an exhibition of drawings that people who were not practising artists produced and used during their work. This was not be an exhibition of art by people who paint or draw as a sideline or hobby, but an exhibition of ‘artwork’ – in particular, drawings that had played a crucial role in their work. In the case of scientists, their drawings made by hand rather than by computer, and which had formed part of the research process. In response to this initiative, I collected together some drawings made during the period 1985 to 1987 when the field of Fullerene Science was born.