In recent years, emphasis in education has been put on getting science-minded students to major in the STEM studies: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. While these are vitally important to the continued success of the US educational system that trains the scientists and engineers who will tackle some of the most important problems facing us today, I suggest that in addition to the four dimensions of STEM, there should be a fifth dimension, that of Arts. Thus, STEM would become STEAM (or MATES or TEAMS or whatever). The art these students should be exposed to can take any one of many forms: music, the literary arts, painting/sculpture, woodworking/metalworking, glassblowing, and so on, or even as the subtitle of this piece suggests, horticulture.
I do not suggest this lightly. The argument may arise, why should a highly intelligent student in, say, the School of Engineering, who could be learning to build bridges to replace those in our crumbling infrastructure, spend time across campus in the School of Arts. “Why,” that student might complain, “do I have to learn how to paint, or to throw a pot, or play the clarinet? What value is that to me? To society? I prefer CAD and calipers.”
I may not have all the answers, but I can offer some responses.
As a former PhD researcher, I am now absorbed almost entirely in the subjective art of writing, a long way from the objective requirements of the laboratory. I have retired from the glassware and centrifuges of a biological research lab to wallow among the verbs and nouns of literary pursuits, a transformation that has freed my mind from the absoluteness of 2 + 2 = 4, to 2 + 2 = whatever-the-hell-I-want-it-to-be. I make no predictions here, and I cannot say that all the reasons I suggest below are entirely sufficient in their expression, but I offer a few reasons why I believe even a modicum of understanding of the arts will help a student of science in his/her chosen vocation.
Art requires observation, so vitally important in science. Most artists in oil paints do not merely slop paint on a canvas willy-nilly, they invariably apply it in a much more premeditated manner to produce the painting desired. It’s often far from random, far from haphazard. In painting a portrait, the artist must examine every detail, every nuance, every square millimeter of the face in order to reproduce it on canvas. A portrait is not a highly accurate reproduction of the face, it is not a photograph, though there is a lot of art in photography. While an oil portrait may not capture the detail of the face as well as a photograph, in the hand of a master, the face will be recognizable to most viewers. The painter’s portrait may even bring out elements of the subject that a photograph will miss, or at least not emphasize. Take, for example, Pablo Picasso’s well-known painting, Guernica. Cubist by design, dramatic in execution, Picasso used no known person as a model for the faces in the painting, and the faces are not recognizable as individuals from the town of Guernica. Yet the terror, the absolute horror on the faces of those people well reflects the panic and fear the people in the Basque town of Guernica experienced during the bombing of the town by German aircraft at the request of the Nationalist Forces of Gen. Francisco Franco in 1937. A scientist should be able to discern—and learn from—that incident.
Music requires listening. One need not be a Beethoven or a Sebelius, nor must one know the difference between C# major and C# minor to appreciate good music. But taking the time to at least try to learn to play a musical instrument brings one closer to the ultimate goal of understanding the nuances of the world around us than would hundreds of hours in a lab trying to decipher x² – 2x + 1 = 0. Math can be so very limiting in scope; art never is.
Art takes the scientist out of the lab. The old cliché of the absent-minded professor is not too far off the mark. Ensconced in a lab, dedicated only to the pursuit of a limited goal can result in some heady advances in science. But it pulls the scientist away from his time in society, which is really to be a contributing member of the general public. While science may bring about an end to a pandemic, it is the arts the populace returns to when things get back to “normal.” I do not suggest that a scientist must also be a dual Pulitzer Prize winner such as John Updike, or be a clone of Jackson Pollock, or compose like Duke Ellington, but he/she should be aware of the existence, and the reason for the celebrity of each.
Art informs science as much as science informs art. Science serves all mankind (and animal and plant kind). If a scientist discovers a cure for a disease that saves the life of an artist, does it not require that the scientist at least understand what that artist was trying to do with his/her art? Science and art are, in fact, inextricably linked and cannot be separated. Nor should we want to. At their base, science and art are simply different manifestations of the desire to understand the world around us. A scientist is the artist of the laboratory; the artist is a scientist in his studio.
Art and science are intermixed to a degree we may never have fully acknowledged. For example, Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. His “Girl With Pearl Earring” (painted around 1665) captures the loveliness of the girl in a way I, dabbling in oil paints* could never do. And I suspect no other artist could either. It is a masterpiece unique unto itself. Yet Vermeer could not simply journey to the local artist supply house and purchase oil paints, he had to prepare them himself in his studio. He purchased the crude powders, ground them to an extremely fine powder with a mortar and pestle (it almost seems appropriate that we call the studio a “lab” at this point), and mixed them with oil to just the right consistency before he could use them in a painting. There’s as much science as art in that procedure, and because he had to stop occasionally to prepare new paints—a process that must have taken a considerable amount of time away from the easel—a painting might have taken months or a year to complete.
I would like to be wildly provocative here: art and science are not mutually exclusive. They both arise from the normal human desire to understand our neighbors, our surroundings, our Earth and the heavens, though they may be conducted in fundamentally opposite ways. They are inextricably linked; they always have been and always will be, and we do a disservice to both by training scientists to be strict objectivists without imbuing within them an appreciation for the subjective arts.
*Yes, I have dabbled in oil paints. I love the names of the pigments: alizarin crimson, thalo blue, yellow ochre, cerulean blue, burnt sienna, Payne’s gray, raw umber, and so on.