Over the years, I've found my greatest inspirations come from two places: art and science. This isn't surprising as both disciplines, though seemingly different, have dovetailed from a common seed.
The ancients recognized seven activities as arts: History, Poetry, Comedy, Tragedy, Music, Dance and Astronomy. Each were activities for understanding and communicating, in their own fashion, the mysteries of existence. In fact, science was, in Galileo's time, more like what we know as philosophy today. It wasn't until the Enlightenment with the likes of Bacon that there become "hard" and "soft" ways of understanding the world. But more recently, many thinkers such as mythologist Joseph Campbell, physicist Fritjof Capra, and sociologist Etienne Wenger have pulled these separated tails closer together. They argue that even "hard" science is still not 'true' in any absolute sense. It, like any story or piece of art, is a working hypothesis of the way the world works.
That said, I love the stories and perspective of scientists because, to make a point, they either push their ideas to the extreme or deal with ideas at the extreme. For example, I read an article today about renowned physicist Freeman Dyson:
Dyson’s reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was complicated. Like many physicists, Dyson has always loved explosions, and, of course, uncovering the secrets of nature is the first motivation of science. When he was interviewed for the 1980 documentary “The Day After Trinity,” Dyson addressed the seduction: “I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”
For me, Freeman's perspective of his fellow scientists' relationships with their creations offers an important moral for our industry (as well as any other industry). After all, in the recent Art & Copy trailer, one interviewed advertiser says:
“I think what you do is manufacture any feeling that you want people to have…I was born, as a number of people in advertising, with the gift for sensing what it is that will turn you on.”
1 comments:
There's a book you might like in this regard:
'Falling for Science: Objects in Mind' by Sherry Turkle
Blurb:
"This is a book about science, technology, and love," writes Sherry Turkle. In it, we learn how a love for science can start with a love for an object—a microscope, a modem, a mud pie, a pair of dice, a fishing rod. Objects fire imagination and set young people on a path to a career in science. In this collection, distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers as well as twenty-five years of MIT students describe how objects encountered in childhood became part of the fabric of their scientific selves. In two major essays that frame the collection, Turkle tells a story of inspiration and connection through objects that is often neglected in standard science education and in our preoccupation with the virtual.
http://www.amazon.com/Falling-Science-Objects-Sherry-Turkle/dp/0262201720/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240607607&sr=8-6
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