Two Cultures: Science and Art

In my second year at UCLA, I took my first class in Haines Hall – an English course. As the twenty-odd students began to introduce themselves, we noticed something intriguing. Unwittingly, the science majors in the class (all five of us) had clustered together, occupying one section of the room. The two cultures in the room had already segregated themselves.  

The Beast and a Book, reminiscent of the stereotype of science students in an arts course

I’m a neuroscience major, a science student who enjoys research and biology, but I also love reading. I’ve devoured pretty much everything from Rebecca to Les Miserables, although I confess to sympathizing with the scientists Snow despaired of, who attempted and abandoned Dickens as an “esoteric, tangled” writer. My life is a blend of Snow’s two cultures, and I believe that in our world, the gap between them is shrinking fast.

In my research lab, copies of A Song of Ice and Fire occupy tables alongside neuroscience and physics texts, and a poster of lab safety rules has an image of Remy from Ratatouille on it.

Remy uses his biology to excel at the art of cooking in Ratatouille

We occasionally veer off topic to argue about how research in cognition and neuroscience may impact our understanding of consciousness. Back in high school, my trigonometry teacher taught us to draw fractals, cute little circles embedded in triangles, a mixture of the perfect angles of geometry and the beauty of art. And the arts show many of the same symptoms of being inclusive of the other culture. Movies and TV shows, such as Netflix’s Daredevil, approach themes traditionally relegated to the arts, such as guilt or religion, and infuse them with scientific aspects, from plausible explanations of superhuman abilities to the physical accuracy in the choreography of its brutal action sequences.   

Charlie Cox as the titular vigilante in Netflix's Daredevil

Science as a whole interacts heavily with art, from skillfully rendered diagrams of the body and its pathways to books such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Snow praised the sciences for their democratic environment and for engendering social responsibility that transcends race or class. But I believe that in our world, science and art have begun to intermingle enough that they cannot – and should not – remain discrete, giving way instead to that third culture. Science is objective, ideally free from human bias, and the arts provide insight into who we are, both to ourselves and each other. The Internet created an amalgamation of science and art that facilitates communication between them, and can facilitate the maturation of the third culture.