In the article, “The Future of Science… is Art” written by Jonah Lehrer talks a lot about in order to find more information about the ‘unknown’ people need to start using both science and art. One of the main points that Lehrer makes is that both science and art can benefit from looked and learning from each other. Lehrer made a really good point that made me start to think. He talked about how scientists are learning so much about everything, yet they are also so far away from learning everything. He goes on to talk about, how can scientist get all their questions answered when they don’t  even know what questions to be asking. This is a very good point and it just lead me to thinking about how much is outer that we really don’t know about. He then goes on to say “If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide”. He is talking about the divided between the art and science cultures. He feels that once the two come together more, amazing things will be discovered. This article was a lot harder to read for me. It was longer in length and just the language and ideas being talked about were a little out of my comfort zone and I had to read very slowly so that I could stay with the text.

Glossing the Text 

  • Zeitgeist- The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.
  • Parse- Analyze into its parts and describe their syntactic roles
  • Ephemeral- Lasting for a very short time.
  • Lepidopterist- a person who studies or collects butterflies and moths.
  • Qualia- The internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.
  • Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle– That it is impossible to measure two properties of a quantum object, such as its position and momentum (or energy and time), simultaneously with infinite precision.
  • “The bridging principle” (You may have to look at the text itself, for this definition.)- The neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness.
  • Reductionism– the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.
  • Synapse– A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.
  • Epiphenomenon– a secondary effect or byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process, in particular.
  • Holistic perspective– It means that we are interested in engaging and developing the whole person.
  • Metaphor- A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable

 

Charles Percy Snow, know as C.P. Snow was a novelist for CBE and a English physical chemist. During the time of World War 2, he became a scientific adviser to for the British Government. C.P. Snow also wrote the 11 novel sequence that was part of novel called “Strangers and Brothers”. Then when on to writing more books about science and literature. In the article, “The Future of Science… is Art”  it says that C.P Snow was the one that “coined the two culture cliche”, this means that he was the one who made it clear that artist and scientistic would benefit from each other if they would only worked with each other and understand each others work.

Virginia Woolf was a English writer who used the stream of consciousness. She wanted to capture and write about “life as it was lived”. Woolf gained a lot of knowledge about the mind and used in in her novels. Her goal was to try and describe the mind and its works from the “inside”.