Art and Science

"If an equation doesn't look beautiful, there must be something wrong with the theory," according to Albert Einstein, and "true science and true music require the same kind of thinking."

Science and art always reunite at the top of a mountain, said French writer Flaubert. Ancient Greek artists gave harmony to the proportional beauty of works of art based on the law of numbers.

The golden ratio is the cornerstone of Western classical aesthetics, and by the Renaissance, artists embodied it in scientific principles and realistic techniques such as light and shadow, focal point perspective, human anatomy, and so on, and the shadow of the perfect combination of science and art can be seen in many of Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts of mechanical inventions.

Whether it is the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) education concept advocated in the field of science education, or the many attempts to combine art and technology in the field of art, we are all looking for more possibilities of crossover and integration in the same source.

First, the relationship between humanities and science

As early as the sixth century BC, the Pythagorean school of ancient Greece put forward the idea of "beauty is harmony", and applied these principles to architecture, sculpture, painting, music and other arts.

The Renaissance, which liberated minds imprisoned by religion, was not limited to the humanities, but involved several aspects of the intellectual and cultural spheres, consisting of the humanist movement, the Reformation, and the new scientific movement, all of which were permeated by a kind of rationalism that restored the dignity of the human person.

This period produced many intellectual and academic giants, who exercised their versatility in both the sciences and the humanities, and whose constructs of cross-cultural creativity served to bring the sciences and the humanities together.

Many names can be cited in this regard, such as Leon Battista Jalperti, Verrocchio, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others.

Leonardo da Vinci, in particular, not only excelled in all kinds of art, but also studied all kinds of knowledge, as can be seen from his manuscripts, which show that the scope of his observation and study was very wide, including almost all areas of the humanities and sciences.

He was not only a famous painter, but also a sculptor, engineer, architect, physicist, biologist, and philosopher. In each of these disciplines, he reached the pinnacle of excellence at the time, and was recognized as the most outstanding Italian artist and scientist of the Renaissance.

The best combination of science and art is Leonardo da Vinci, but he is not the first person to combine science and art, nor the last person, in the scientists Li Zhengdao is one of them.

Prof. Li Zhengdao is a physicist, but he also has a great fondness for history, poetry, painting, music and other arts and culture, especially the traditional Chinese culture and art.

He actively advocated the combination of science and art, and since 1987, he has collaborated with artists to create works of art, organized symposiums on "science and art", and published a large-scale picture book entitled "Science and Art".

Since 1987, the Center for Advanced Science and Technology of China (CACST) has been organizing international scientific conferences every year, in which not only world-class Chinese and foreign scientists and young Chinese scholars take part, but also artists are invited to make paintings based on the scientific themes of the conferences.

To this day, the integration of science and art is a requirement of the times, and a need for mankind's own development. It has not only been widely practiced at a high level, but has gradually become a "public subject".

Second, the artistic imagination, aesthetic requirements on the impact of science

The essence of scientific research is to reveal the mysteries of nature. Nature itself has some basic features, such as simplicity, beauty, symmetry, harmony, etc., necessarily reflected in its physical laws (laws or formulas).

Scientific research is actually to reveal the beauty of nature, scientific research to the highest level will certainly develop to the level of art.

Science can show beauty at different levels, especially in the physical nature and mathematical basis. An equation can show the beauty of simplicity and symmetry, and the golden number is associated with beautiful five-fold symmetry (like a pentagram).

When you see a golden number, you can also say that you see the fractal structure of a connected fraction, a connected rooted fractal (flower and dendritic fractal, respectively), and thus you can have a beautiful pattern of fractals in your mind's eye.

A nonlinear equation can be associated with the waves of water in a ditch or even the crashing waves of the ocean.

And on the other hand, from an artistic point of view, nature is actually the most masterful artist. Many artists are actually absorbing artistic nourishment from the ghostly nature and expressing the beauty of nature.

Li Zhengdao said: " Science and art are inseparable, like two sides of a coin. They **** the same basis is human creativity. The goal they both pursue is the universality of truth. "

Art, such as poetry, painting, sculpture, music, etc., uses creative techniques to evoke emotions that already exist deep in everyone's conscious or subconscious mind. The more precious the emotion, the stronger the evocation, and the more universal the reaction, the better the art.

The sciences, such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., make new and accurate abstractions of the phenomena of nature. The simpler the elaboration of the scientist's abstraction and the more widely it is applied, the more profound the scientific creation.

Although natural phenomena themselves do not depend on scientists for their existence, the abstraction and summarization of nature belong to the crystallization of human wisdom, the same as the creation of artists.

The universals pursued by scientists are a specific class of abstractions and summaries, applicable to all natural phenomena, whose truth is rooted in the external world beyond the scientist.

The universal truth sought by the artist is also external, rooted in the whole of humanity, and has no boundaries of time or space.

While scientists study the universal laws of nature and pursue the true nature of nature, artists explore nature, and at some moments they are also pursuing the truth of nature, but more often, they are exploring the beauty of nature. Goethe said: " Artists are creating the second nature, they reveal the truth of art. "

Southern dynasty painter Zong Bing said: "landscape with the form of charming Tao" "quality and interest in the spirit", the beauty of art, art of the spirit of interest, it is the nature of the quality, "Tao The beauty and interest of art is the quality of nature and the appearance of "Tao". The beauty of art, the spirit of art, is the appearance of the natural quality, the "Tao". "Enchanting the Tao" is to use the form of artistic beauty to express the way of nature and the quality of nature, which is the highest essence of art!

Cai Yuanpei strongly advocated aesthetic education in the early Republic of China, that light and color in physics, atomic symbols table in chemistry, images and shapes of plants and animals in biology, and geometric shapes in mathematics, beauty exists everywhere, and he believed that aesthetic education in schools can be carried out not only in art and music classes, but also in the natural sciences classes.

Natural scientists in the exploration of the laws of nature, and sometimes by the natural things of the image, form, symmetry, diversity and unity, light and color changes and other perceptual beauty of the stimulation, inspired by the creative inspiration, leading to new scientific discoveries.

So Qian Xuesen believes that in the logical thinking and image thinking two kinds of thinking, there is a kind of inspiration thinking, and inspiration thinking for scientists and artists are the same need. Image thinking and inspirational thinking nourishes the rational thinking of scientists, in other words, some moments of art and beauty in a way to inspire and help scientists in their creative activities.

On the other hand, while figurative thinking in artistic creation relies mainly on feelings, representations, emotions, imagination, and intuitive activities, rational thinking and logical understanding often help artists to determine the spirit of the theme and make it work in the composition of the picture, the arrangement of the plot of a grand scene and a long story, and the treatment of complex spaces in paintings.

Liang Qichao in the early 1920s at the National Beiping Art College, "art and science" speech, that the modern Western culture evolved from the Renaissance era, the roots of modern culture is science, from the surface of the art (Liang Qichao said the art of art that is "Art") is the product of emotion, science is the product of reason, the two things seem to be the product of reason. On the surface, it seems that art (Liang Qichao said art is "Art") is a product of emotion, and science is a product of reason, two things seem incompatible, but the essence of the two brothers, they complement each other.

Liang Qichao believes that art and science *** with the mother is "Mrs. Nature", and the key to art in the "observation of nature", art so that science, all from the "true beauty" concept of unity occurs. "The concept of unity occurs out of the" enthusiasm and cold brain combination is the main conditions for the creation of first-class works of art, on the other hand, is not the main conditions for the establishment of science? "

Liang Qichao also predicted that China's future "scientific fine arts", "fine arts science", and this is entrusted to the National Institute of Fine Arts gentlemen, hoping that they create a scientific art. (Liang Qichao, "Art and Science", in Dai Wusan and Liu Bing, "Art and Science Reader", Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2008)

Da Vinci, a Renaissance artist and scientist, pointed out that "Painting is indeed a science, and a legitimate daughter of nature. "Science, as Da Vinci understood it, is the exploration of nature. Painting is also a means of exploring nature.

He believed that all our knowledge comes from the senses, and that vision is the most important sense organ through which we acquire knowledge of nature. Painting is a visual art, and as such it is closer to science than any other category of art. A real science should have two basic conditions: one is based on sensory experience, and the other is to be able to argue as rigorously as mathematics. The art of painting has these two conditions.

"The science of painting is the study of objects in all their colors, of the shapes of objects defined by their surfaces, and of their proximity and distance, including the degree of blurring of objects caused by the increase of distance. This science is the mother of perspective (the science of sight)." (Da Vinci on Painting, compiled by Dai Mian, People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1979)

Alberty and Da Vinci during the Renaissance period combined the study of perspective in painting with the mathematical basis of geometry, and discovered the laws of focal point perspective, line perspective, and air perspective, etc., as well as the study of color, and found that the color shading and the presentation of the object's sense of concavity and convexity in the plane of the three-dimensional sense of the law, which became the law of realistic oil painting in the West. This became the basis for the scientific reproduction of things in Western realistic oil painting.

There are some natural phenomena that scientists and artists may **** together to explore, such as the study of color and light.

Newton's greatest contribution to optics was his theory of color, in which he proved experimentally that sunlight, or white light, is composed of many colors of light. He broke down an incident beam of white light into rainbow-like bands of colored light through a prism. Newton endowed his light particles with the property of "swiftly becoming easily seen, swiftly becoming easily reflected".

The artist Goethe wrote three major volumes of monographs on the subject of color, the first volume of 651 pages, nearly 300 pages of critique of Newton's doctrines, the second volume of 757 pages of ****, an informative historical review of the various theories of color from Pythagoras to Newton, and a number of charts and graphs of color in the third volume.

Goethe's theory of color is non-mathematical and subjective; Goethe's emphasis is on the fact that color belongs to psychological effects.

Heisenberg said: "Goethe's theory of color constructs for us a harmonious order in which even the smallest details have a life-giving content and encompasses the whole sphere of objective and subjective representation of color."

Third, the promotion of scientific discoveries and technological progress on the development of art

In the integration of art and science, the combination of science and technology and art is more closely. The development of science and technology provides new means of expression for art and expands the space for artistic expression.

For example, in the 6th century BC, the Pythagorean school applied the latest science and technology to architecture and music, applied the study of the relationship between the length and thickness of the strings and the melody to the manufacture of musical instruments, and applied the study of the relationship between the beauty and a certain proportion to architecture and music.

The bronze chimes unearthed from Zeng Houyi's tomb in Suixian, Hubei Province, China, utilized the very advanced sound technology, smelting and casting technology of the time.

The pyramids of ancient Egypt were built under the highly developed premise of mathematics, astronomy, and physics at that time; the development of Western oil painting is inseparable from perspective, anatomy, color science, and optics.

The study of space and time is not only a field explored by scientists, but also a subject of experimentation by artists.

The absolute view of space and time, represented by Isaac Newton, views time and space as two coexisting and absolutely separate entities independent of matter.

The special theory of relativity created by Albert Einstein in 1905 pointed out that the measure of time and space are relative, and that inertial systems with different speeds cannot have absolutely the same time scale and space scale.

Since the classical view of time and space in natural science has been challenged, can't the view of time and space in painting be rethought? Apollinaire and Picasso often talked about the new term "fourth space" in their studios in this scientific atmosphere.

Picasso wanted to make a new exploration of space-time expression in painting. Influenced by Einstein's "fourth space" theory, Picasso founded Cubism. Picasso re-examined the space of painting, broke down the form in the picture, reorganized the image, and used the imagined image to replace the natural image, realizing a great revolution in painting.

In 1909, Futurism, represented by Italian artists such as Boccioni and Carla, introduced the concept of time into static paintings and sculptures, and took power, speed, mechanics, and movement as the themes expressed in paintings, and expressed the new features brought by machinery in the industrial society, and created works such as The Mechanics of an Automobile. Picasso, Bocchini, and Carla used painting to make new explorations of the problems of space and time.

With the rapid development of modern science and technology, the style of art also has a greater space for development. For example: movies, television, fashion, industrial design, electro-acoustic music and so on.

The combination of modern science and technology and art has greatly enriched the artistic expression and expanded the space of artistic expression. For example, computer painting, computer design architecture, electronic music, computer animation and so on.

Mr. Liang Yan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has made a series of videos called "Beautiful Chemistry", which illustrates the beauty of science from an artistic perspective, and allows more children to fall in love with chemistry at the stage of scientific enlightenment.

A number of artists collaborated with scientists and musicians to adapt weather data into musical scores for performances, calling attention to climate change using the artistic method of data visualization.

IV. A perfect example of combining art and science

1 Taxidermy art

Japanese artist Iori Tomita has a special appreciation for the "art of death", which combines chemicals with art to reveal the wonderful skeletal structures of marine life. He has created a large number of marine specimens, including fish, turtles and seahorses, by applying chemicals to the corpses and then drying and preserving them. The chemicals break down the proteins and muscles of the carcasses, leaving only the collagen behind, thus preserving the skeletal structure of the organisms in its entirety.

2 Botanical illustrations

Hundreds of years ago, botanical illustrations were an effective way for people to document plants with healing properties, and detailed illustrations of herbs and other plants allowed botanists and physicians to identify plant species with medicinal value. It is believed that the oldest well-preserved botanical illustration to date is the "Codex Vindebonensis", which dates back to 512 AD.

3 Climate Science

Marco Tedkos, an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the City University of New York, has noticed wonderful things about climate science, such as flooding, cloud structure, and melting ice. To make climate science more compelling, he and his colleagues*** developed a research project called Polarseeds, which presents the diverse art of climate science through photography, music, and video.

4 Earth Art

NASA's Earth Resources Satellite (ERS), which captures mountains, canyons, islands, forests, and grasslands, has taken a large number of photographs of the Earth, providing important data on the use of the planet's landmasses and natural resources.

5 Leonardo da Vinci

Italian painter, architect, engineer, sculptor, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by anatomy, and was so interested in the structure of the human body that he once claimed to have dissected more than 30 cadavers, and drew extensively on the structure of the human organs and limbs.

6 The Art of Fibonacci

Mathematics enthusiasts know that the Fibonacci sequence is an important sequence of numbers, with the first set of 9-number sequences being 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. The Fibonacci sequence has direct applications in modern physics, quasi-crystalline structures, chemistry, and other fields. To the surprise of scientists, Fibonacci series structures also exist in nature, such as sunflowers, galaxies, honeycomb structures, and hurricanes.

7 Microscopic art

Scientific photographer Martyn Ogletree uses a scanning electron microscope to take microscopic photographs of pollen, bacteria, insects, and fungi at magnifications of more than 500,000 times. His photographs are often published on National Geographic Channel, and he says, "I hope to make more people aware of the world's tiniest organisms, which have perfect body structures and deserve our attention!"

8 Bioluminescent Art

Bioluminescent artworks use naturally glowing bacteria to form intricate patterned structures that are only visible in dim light. As shown here, these colorful bioluminescent bacteria exist in the marine environment, and researchers have placed them in petri dishes to glow in dim light.

9 Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist who was the greatest German artist of the Nordic Renaissance, and whose woodcuts and watercolors show precise animal anatomy. As shown in the picture, this is his print - "Rhinoceros", created in the 18th century, this work has a clear and accurate rhinoceros limb proportions and structure.

10 Sonic Statue

British artist Luke Jerram was able to skillfully combine science and art, as shown in the "Sonic Statue" made by Jerram. Science writer Joy Hansen said, "The invisible sound waves are visualized in the form of a 3D statue, giving a whole new experience!"