Betteridge’s law of headlines states that we should assume that any news article that is a question can be answered with a simple “no”. This, thankfully, isn’t a news article, so I think that it can be thrown out the window in this case. I think if you looked at people in STEM, at a glance, you would find that many people in STEM would say things like “we don’t need arts in STEM”. I know I used to think this way, but then realised that function and form are not mutually exclusive, and in fact go hand in hand. I heard one of these at my own dinner table, while eating with my family and realised that STEM brain rot starts early, and is widespread. God forbid you expand your horizons a little bit and learn more than the bare minimum to survive.
My educational background is in engineering– mechanical engineering more specifically. The benefits I have seen in mechanical engineering is that there is great emphasis on creativity. I may be writing long reports, but I use many pictures and the designs used clearly show that there is more than just creating value for shareholders at play. A module I took last year had group work, creative writing and even graphic design as tasks which were part of the final grade of this module, and in the end we were better off. Isolating the mechanical design from the artistic design creates functional items lacking in aesthetic, and can similarly create beautiful items lacking feasibility. A well rounded education in both of these domains lend each other to create both beautiful and functional items at once.
Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands. That is one of the most famous sayings about engineering.
Similarly, looking very close to home, a new children’s hospital can have significant cost overruns and delays, and it is spun as a normal thing by people with our best interests at heart. Lesser people would resign and admit fault, and that is the power of words, which numbers can’t explain. At the end of the day, is there a difference between the two beyond the cost?
Effective communication is vital to life, and if a choice had to be made between someone who could talk good and someone who couldn’t, is it hard to make a decision on who to trust? If you take your mind to a courtroom, and go to the stand, there are only so many things which can be understood by a jury and a judge. Being able to explain clearly why the bridge failed, and where culpability lies, is the difference between justice and injustice. I sometimes struggle to understand the terms in my lectures– what chance do lay people have if the ideas can’t get through to them effectively? Our Dáil is filled with these people, and they seem to be doing well for themselves.
There is nothing more fun in the library than going onto Wikipedia, questioning your life choices and clicking the random button, going down a rabbit hole of various articles. What piques my interest? Anything that couldn’t be covered in my lectures. I yearn for a change of content, something fresh and new perspectives. It is fascinating to learn about, arts and science alike, and provides new perspectives that can help me focus on my real work when I snap out and reconsider my life choices a second time. It is the second most productive use of my time in the library– ahead of Solitaire and behind actually working.
Da Vinci was a renaissance man, having painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. He was also a designer and engineer– the word polymath is appropriate to describe him. He designed countless things, some he could build and some he could not. When these were later built, some were successful and some were not. Ball bearings and canal locks count among his successful designs. He did not constrain himself to one field of study, even the fields which are now more specialised like anatomy, biology, geology, maths and engineering. He was ahead of his time, and his greatness is something to be admired and emulated. His impact has been so great that they even named a turtle after him. Without anatomy and opening up cadavers, art as we know it would be different, and La Gioconda would not be hanging on the walls of the Louvre.
The idea of a renaissance man, or a polymath, who was well versed in all affairs of arts and science is one that is going away. While access to patrons is much more difficult to access, this is due in part to changing economic landscapes and status symbols. The wealthy banking Medici family of Florence sponsored DaVinci, as a symbol of their power and wealth, Andrew Carnegie sponsored libraries and universities across the world, and our modern billionaire class sponsors spaceflight. The benefits of this latest funding is yet to be observed, and much remains to be seen what the status symbols and vanity projects of tomorrow are.
Another aspect of this is the vast amounts of knowledge required to be a “modern DaVinci”. Knowledge of the world was far more limited back than, that science was a single field, and arts were a separate field. Science as a field now contains many fields, from chemistry, to biology, and physics, and their vast amounts of disciplines. To be a polymath on par with the greats of old would require a time investment far greater than is reasonable to expect one person to accomplish in one lifetime. Similarly with arts, being an artist is one part of the description, but painters and sculptors are two different jobs, and the space required to do both are not available to the vast majority in this modern world we live in.
Albert Einstein credited his discovery of The Law of Relativity to a thought that came about while playing the violin. He never won a Nobel prize for his work related to relativity, which goes to show your most important work won’t always be the one recognised with a fancy medal. Playing music won’t make you a Nobel prize winner, or close to a contender, but it will make you a more rounded person, capable of more than just staring in a microscope or rearranging numbers and letters. You can’t teach creativity, but you can foster an environment where creativity can thrive, at the intersection of art and science. You can’t reach the Moon by climbing successively taller trees, you do it by changing your approach to the problem. Doing things as they were done previously can yield partial results, but a moonshot is needed for the transformation of a field like what Einstein did for physics. His contributions didn’t reach the Moon, but the analogy stands.
What impact does more modern media have on people?
Media has often inspired people to their life’s aspirations. Georges Méliès first depicted humans visiting the moon, before the Wright brothers first flew. It would not be long before actual humans visited the actual Moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. The idea did not come from nowhere, but from people. Other people try to create the “Torment Nexus” and this shows the long-lasting impact media can have on people, for better or for worse.
While there may be people from these STEM backgrounds working alongside them, the people who made them happen, the directors and writers more than likely came from arts backgrounds. The direction that they go, whether for good or bad, such as bridge building or bomb making shows the direct impact of what people can do with the same thoughts. Some think The Catcher in the Rye makes you want to kill people, some think it is pornographic. It won’t turn you into an engineer, but it does highlight the different ways that people choose to engage with media, and contrasting it with something more mainstream such as Star Wars shows two reactions: Fighting against oppression and cool lasers. The ability to properly engage with media leads people to draw the wrong lessons from what they read, and encouraging media literacy can draw people to make better decisions.
Art and science are two sides of the same coin. By separating them, we build an artificial divide, and split people’s attention into one camp or the other. There is no reason why these can’t be combined, as described previously. By combining them, the potential that can be reached is limitless. Ethics can’t be taught, but shaping people’s minds to make them better aware of the consequences of their actions is doable.
