Scientific illustration straddles two apparently disparate knowledge sectors: art and science. To most people, the word “art” invokes creativity and imagination, while “science” conjures measurement and calculation. As scientific illustrators, we are likely to come across artists who cannot appreciate the scientific nature of our work and scientists who cannot comprehend our artistic process. Here, I take a few minutes to reflect on some observations about the relationship between art and science by introducing the author C.P. Snow’s concept of “The Two Cultures.”
Between the two worlds of science and art lies a shared need for human ingenuity. Art and science both rely on an often incalculable mixture of technical skill, hard work, creativity, and luck. I think the shared process of trial and error, experimentation, and desire for excellence and innovation should serve as a reminder that all human endeavors are connected and can produce both beautiful and ground breaking results.
In 1959, the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a seminal speech known as “The Two Cultures.” This speech explored the connection between people practicing science and those studying humanities.
He saw the two fields becoming dangerously disconnected from one another. Snow decried increasing specialization in academics and industry, and worried that segmentation left both sides “impoverished.” Specialists in the arts lack an understanding that “the physical world...in its intellectual depth, complexity, and articulation [is] the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.” Scientists meanwhile, impoverish themselves by lacking “imaginative understanding.”
Richard Feynman, a quantum physicist who eventually dabbled in art, echoed Snow, saying that an artist friend told him, “scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations.” Feynman eventually started drawing because he never found artists sufficiently able to convey the “scientific awe” that he saw so often in his physics experiments.
Like Feynman, Snow observed in “The Two Cultures” that, “it is bizarre how very little of twentieth century science has been assimilated into twentieth century art.” The field of scientific illustration provides a partial solution, a way for art to celebrate the diversity and beauty of the natural world. Scientific illustration is a way of describing: ranging from delicate renderings of ammonite fossils that display the Fibonacci sequence in nature, to sketches drawn in medical offices to help patients understand a disease. Frank Netter, the renowned medical illustrator and doctor, wrote that “the making of pictures is a stern discipline. One may ‘write around’ a subject where one is not quite sure of the details, but, with brush in hand before the drawing board, one must be precise and realistic. The white paper before the artist demands the truth.”
At times, drawing can communicate truth faster and more eloquently than words. C.P. Snow’s speech resonates with me because it articulates problems with overspecialization and provides a starting point to discuss the philosophical relationship that discovery plays in art and science.
Fenyman, Richard P. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! Vintage. London. 1985. Page 261.
Snow, C.P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," Cambridge University Press. New York. 1961.
Netter, Frank F. Atlas of Human Anatomy, Student Edition. Elsevier Health Sciences. 2002.