John Maeda, best known for his work on the computer game Second Life as well as his book, The Laws of Simplicity, makes the case for a smaller distinction between science and art in this November 14, article from The Guardian.
Science Must Embrace Art Says John Maeda
November 15, 2010 at 6:21 pm
One Comment
Hugh O'Donnell posted on November 22, 2010 at 9:28 pm
I met John Maeda at the media lab in 1998 and he impressed me then. I went on to meet EO Wilson that year and was better prepared by this meeting to enjoy his, then new book. It had a big influence on me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience:_The_Unity_of_Knowledge
“Consilience”: The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book by the humanist biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the culture gap between the sciences and the humanities that was the subject of C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). Wilson’s assertion was that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understanding the details, to lend to all inquirers “a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.” Wilson’s concept is a much broader notion of consilience than that of Whewell, who was merely pointing out that generalizations invented to account for one set of phenomena often account for others as well.