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Underwater silica streamers in New Zealand. Click to enlarge. I recently came across an interesting quote by Robert Root-Bernstein, a MacArthur Fellowship "genius" teaching physiology at Michigan State, and the controversial author of Rethinking AIDS.
The quote is from a letter to the editor in the July 2006 Physics Today written by Kent Eschenberg
Most eminent scientists agree that nonverbal forms of thought are much more important in their work than verbal ones. This observation leads me to propound the following hypothesis. The most influential scientists have always nonverbally imagined a simple, new reality before they have proven its existence through complex logic or produced evidence through complicated experiments.
...I suggest that this ability to imagine new realities is correlated with what are traditionally thought to be nonscientific skills—skills such as playing, modeling, abstracting, idealizing, harmonizing, analogizing, pattern forming, approximating, extrapolating, and imagining the as yet unseen—in short, skills usually associated with the arts, music, and literature. (Click here for full quote.)
Root-Bernstein investigates creativity and is a champion of the essential nature of the art-science interface. (He himself is something of a digital artist.) In his Music, Creativity and Scientific Thinking, he goes even further than the above quote, clearly putting scientists and artists at the same level:
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