Questions Without Answers
December 11th, 2007 andrea
I’ve had some time today to read and think while preparing for a flight (hopefully) to Westhaven tomorrow night (–update–it was cancelled) and found two statements about art/life/science that are helping me to untangle the jumble of thoughts and emotions I’ve been experiencing since arriving here. They raise more questions than answers to me, but that’s somehow beneficial right now. Both are from Nature, March 17, 2005.
The first is from Simon Mawer:
“Because, just as an artistic creation lives in the mind of its creator, so too does a scientific idea. We labor under the illusion that discoveries and ideas lie somewhere out there in nature-but in truth the science is in the discoverer’s head…There is little difference between this and artistic vision. Yes, you’ve got to do the experiments but that is not the essence of it. The essence is the idea and the enquiry. ‘What if?’ is the question posed in both literature [art] and science.”
And from Alan Lightman:
“Somehow, we human beings have a wondrous capacity for being both rational and irrational, detached and passionate, deliberate and spontaneous, craving of certainty and uncertainty, seeking questions with answers and questions without.”
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