Week 1: Two Cultures

Perhaps no one's more familiar with this dichotomy of art and science than I am. A linguistics major who's recently switched from physics, and a working photojournalist, I see both ends of this argument that scientists have divulged from what science used to be: an art.

I'm compelled to say, however, that this view is fundamentally flawed.

Categorizing art and science in this way separates the two into mutually exclusive worlds, with no gray area in between. Nay, there is art, there is science, and there is a spectrum of somewhat-art-and-somewhat-science. There are things like the Zeiss lens Stanley Kubrick used for Barry Lyndon (one of the largest aperture lenses ever made). Of the ten made, Kubrick bought three to film scenes in candlelight, NASA bought six and Zeiss kept one for posterity.

Queen guitarist and physicist Brian May at
the Paranal Observatory in 2015.

Or the PhD thesis by astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May, which in its body contains both of May's photography and scientific studies. Not to mention he's one of the most celebrated guitarists of all time.

This also ties into whether to consider the field of linguistics a science or part of humanities. There are clearly subfields such as neurolinguistics and computational linguistics that fall almost squarely into the sciences. Then there's things like semantics that are much closer to the humanities. What really divides the two, then? Is there even a need for a third culture?

Broca's and Wernicke's areas.
Regions of the brain responsible for language processing.

The divide certainly began in the difference in logical processes of the two fields. However, as the sciences also diversified and the arts incorporated scientific findings and advances, this became insufficient. So I've come to the conclusion that what makes something a science is how close something adheres to the scientific method of controlled experiments against a given known. As long as something, even art, follows the method it can be considered science.


1. Unknown. "OMAGGIO ALL'IMMORTALE  KUBRICK ED AL MITICO PLANAR 50mm f/0,7."  Web. http://www.marcocavina.com/omaggio_a_kubrick.htm
2. Unknown. Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon. Photograph. 1975. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000040/mediaviewer/rm444611840
3. May, Brian Harold. "A survey of radial velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud." Web. 2008. Imperial College London.
4. Huedepohl, Gerhard. Rock star and astrophysicist Brian May visits Paranal. Photograph. 2015. https://www.eso.org/public/images/ann15074a/
5. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders. "Aphasia." Web. 2017. https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/aphasia