Posts tagged arts

This was written for a competition at Sydney University asking why we should study either arts or science. It won, and was later printed in The Australian newspaper.

Artists are oddly insecure about science. John Keats lamented its ability to “unweave the rainbow”, and Walt Whitman urged us to ignore “the learn’d astronomer” and instead just look at the stars. Implicit in these lines is the idea that science is dry and dusty, the province of charts and equations that strip the beauty from nature, to be dissected and locked away in glass cases. Given the steady decline in science enrolments around the world, this view seems to have caught on. But nothing could be further from the truth. Science offers a rare blend of intellectual elegance, civic contribution, and economic benefit. Far more than just dreary repetition, science “needs the free play of the mind in as great a degree as any other creative art”, in the words of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born. It is one of humanity’s greatest academic achievements, and students should take the opportunity to be a part of it.

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