+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: General Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-81.html)
+--- Thread: Art wins out? Scientists explain what their 2nd-Choice careers would be (/thread-5129.html)
Art wins out? Scientists explain what their 2nd-Choice careers would be - C C - Apr 3, 2018
http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/why-do-so-many-scientists-want-to-be-filmmakers
EXCERPT: For the past five years, Nautilus has asked scientists what they would be if they weren’t a scientist. I can now report what, above all, they want to be. “Film director,” says physicist David Deutsch. “A filmmaker,” says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. “I would make movies,” says astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger.
It’s easy to see why. Movies were often the first experiences that sparked scientists’ curiosity about the world. “I was so into cinema when I was younger,” says astrophysicist Daniel Wolf Savin. “I would see 80 to 100 movies a year.” Confronting mysteries in a fantasy world became a romantic quest to solve them in the real one.
[...] Judging the responses on a curve, tossing out the extremes, like being a gorilla, filmmaker marks the apex, rounded out by artists of other kinds: musician, painter, novelist, poet. Kirk Johnson, a paleontologist and illustrator, and director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, sounds a theme that appears as regularly as a Beethoven motif in the interviews. Rather than being separate pursuits, art and science spring from the same desire to peel back the surface and reveal the world anew.
“Both science and art are creativity and imagination and execution,” Johnson says. “You come up with new ideas and you test those ideas and you execute them. So I find that the creative people of the world come in many flavors. People always talk about science and art as being very different things, and I find them to be very similar things.”
MORE: http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/why-do-so-many-scientists-want-to-be-filmmakers
RE: Art wins out? Scientists explain what their 2nd-Choice careers would be - Magical Realist - Apr 12, 2018
Quote:“Both science and art are creativity and imagination and execution,” Johnson says. “You come up with new ideas and you test those ideas and you execute them. So I find that the creative people of the world come in many flavors. People always talk about science and art as being very different things, and I find them to be very similar things.”
Art and science both spring from a fundamental love for the impersonal world around us and an ability for appreciating the intricate patterns it expresses. It is the thrill of finding a unifying narrative or whole where before there were only disrelated and random fragments. It is the evocation of order from disorder---and the profound beauty of that order from mundane and trivial happenstance.
RE: Art wins out? Scientists explain what their 2nd-Choice careers would be - Syne - Apr 12, 2018
Spoken like a non-artist.