Book ID: CBB788755093

The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (2021)

unapi

McLeish, Tom C. B. (Author)


Oxford University Press


Publication Date: 2021
Physical Details: 432
Language: English

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. This book challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime. Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.

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Associated with

Article Bennett Zon (2020) As it says on the tin. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (pp. 35-40). unapi

Article James Leach (2020) Creativity in an Occidental mode. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (pp. 41-45). unapi

Article Michael H. Whitworth (2020) The historicity of ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’: a response to Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science (2019). Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (pp. 8-15). unapi

Article Steve Fuller (2020) Art and science: representation or expression?. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (pp. 16-22). unapi

Article Irmtraud Huber (2020) Another Poetry of Science: Tom McLeish (2019) in comparison with Robert Hunt (1848). Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (pp. 23-28). unapi

Article Andrew Hugill (2020) Transboundaries: Moving across the art/science divide. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (pp. 29-34). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB788755093/

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Authors & Contributors
Walton, Benjamin
Trippett, David
McLeish, Tom C. B.
Bychkova, Olga
Francesco Brusori
Irmtraud Huber
Concepts
Imagination
Science and literature
Science and culture
Science and art
Creativity; genius
Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
17th century
Renaissance
Medieval
Places
South Korea
United States
Netherlands
Sweden
Russia
Latin America
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