A big idea that blurs boundaries

Artscience

Creativity in the Post-Google Generation

David Edwards

Harvard University Press: 196 pp., $19.95

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SeVERAL years ago, in a collection of her fiction, nonfiction and poetry, Lynne Sharon Schwartz made a vivid argument against specialization in the arts.

"I had never planned to be a novelist in the first place," she declared. "I had planned, from the age of seven, to be a writer. A writer writes anything and everything, just as a composer composes anything -- not only sonatas or only nocturnes or only symphonies."

She's right, of course, for specialization offers a progressive narrowing of vision, rather than the expansion upon which discovery depends. And yet, we live in a culture that prizes specialization, that distrusts serendipity or the blurring of boundaries, that tells us it is better to be an expert than a generalist.

Such a notion -- or, more accurately, its refutation -- resides at the center of David Edwards' "Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation," a book that seeks to bridge perhaps the widest of the specialization gaps, the one separating science and art.

"Among the sources of administrative inertia that weigh heavily on our educational and culture institutions," Edwards writes, "is the famous divide between art and science cultures. . . . That chasm still cuts through our cultural institutions and universities."

For Edwards, this is not an intellectual conceit. A professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard University, he also is the founder of Le Laboratoire, an art and science center in Paris, and he's passionate that these areas of inquiry can overlap.

The key is to rethink the traditional roles of art and science, to find a middle ground where we might frame aesthetic solutions to scientific questions, or apply a scientific rigor to the challenges of art.

"[T]he fused method that results," he argues, "at once aesthetic and scientific -- intuitive and deductive, sensual and analytical, comfortable with uncertainty and able to frame a problem, embracing nature in its complexity and able to simplify to nature in its essence -- is what I call artscience."

Edwards is hardly the first observer to identify a confluence between art and science. The most interesting science always relies on leaps of the imagination: "[W]here gaps exist among the facts of geology," John McPhee noted in his 1981 book "Basin and Range," "the space between is often filled with things 'geopoetical.' "