Art that led to invention? Trying to explain the practicality/necessity of art....

Cafe Society
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MAIN QUESTION: I would like to know if there are many accounts where scientists were actually inspired by a work of art (music, paintings, literature, etc.). I’d like especially to know about accounts from before, perhaps the 19th century.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of a way to explain how, essentially, all parts of culture/society are integral and necessary. Art is a good starting point, I think.

To be more explicit, what I’m trying to do is show that while some parts of culture may not directly lead to the advancement of society, they may be serve as one link or bridge somewhere between point A and point F.

I often debate some of my conservative, pragmatic friends in my head. I can hear them asking, “Why should we pay to have art classes for our children? Art doesn’t do anything. Fine, it may tell how much pain there is the world, or it may be pleasent to look at, but it doesn’t *do *anything. It doesn’t *end *the pain, except perhaps for the artist.”

What I’m thinking, though is that it might do quite a bit more than is apparent, and in several different respects.

(1) the creativity of others stoking some creativity in others:

Is creativity contagious? I remember when I was in Barcelona, for example, my mind was racing. I felt like I was in a place that just oozed creativity. Even the grafitti on the walls was stunning! I wanted to be a part of it. I still want to move there.

So, imagine a place without art, would there be the same general drive to create (both scientifically and artistically)?

(2) Something imagined in some piece could actually be realized by a scientist:

This seems apparent with movies. It seems that we’re always looking back at old movies to the imaginary gadgets they presented, gadgets which are now reality for us.

(3) Invention actually is art:

I’m thinking of Da Vinci. There is such a thin line between what is invention and what is art. Are there other examples of people who are both artists and inventors?

Maybe what I’m arguing simply concerns imagination in general, not just a distinction between art/science.

Imagine yourself debating someone who thinks (1) art is just a bunch of troubled/abused/homosexuals complaining about how hard their lives are and (2) it actually has no applicable value to society. What do you say?

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Re: your final question

I’d say: A major part of what we’re doing here is learning something about ourselves and human nature. Why are we here? What am I? How can I live a good life? Art can be a means of answering such questions.

Sure, on a totally pragmatic, day-to-day survival level, we don’t NEED, say, poetry. But I sure wouldn’t want to live in a world without it. Without art, I’m not sure if we can even consider ourselves fully human. If the whole point of our lives is practicality, then what’s the point?

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Two examples come to mind:

  1. The development of the mathematics of perspective in the early Renaissance: in the late 1300’s, especially in Florence, there were three major early-Ren artists: Masaccio in painting, Donatello in sculpture and Brunelleschi in architecture (you could argue Ghiberti, but he is generally thought to be harkening back to pre-Renaissance vs. Donatello, but I digress). Anyway, at the time Brunellschi was working out and codifying the mathematics of perspective and the concept of a vanishing point - as part of that, he laid out drawing to illustrate how perspective worked. Major artists of the era including Paolo Uccello seized upon this approach and used it in the large canvases they did - there is a famous work - one of a set of 3 (? going by memory here) documenting a major Florentine battle, where the men on horseback are fighting and broken spears lay at their feet, which happen to map out the rules of perspective - based on that, the figures in the painting are appropriately sized given their relation to the vanishing point. It is an artwork that is a mathematical illustration of the simple rules of perspective.

This isn’t the painting i was thinking of, but you can see how aggressively Uccello was trying to interpret perspective: http://www.webtre.it/images/quadro3.jpg

here it is: http://cache.eb.com/eb/image?id=4810 see how the broken spears lay out a grid…

  1. The other is the at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century and the convergence of physics, art and music. With physics, you had the emergence of atomic there, leading to quantum physics and relativity. There was the Michaelson-Morley experiment where they attempted to prove the existence of ether, an near-undetectible substance permeating our world and enable the propagation of light as a wave. When that experiment failed - there is no ether - then the particle-based definition of light - which led to the identification of protons and influenced the development of the atom-based defintion of matter - ended up holding sway. I think Rutherford and/or Bors had the first popularly accepted atom-based defintion. At the same time, art was moving from Impressionism - a more individual-based view of art, both in terms of subject matter (art didn’t need to be of religious icons) and perception (art didn’t have to be strictly representational) to a more particle-based definition of color (you could break light down into its component parts, as did Seurat, Sisley, Signac and Van Gogh) and not only render non-traditional subjects, but do so in a way that capture a more innovative definition of light and color, breaking them down into their component parts. Same with Debussey and music.

I am going off the top of my head here (I am at a business conference in New Orleans and just got back from hanging out on Bourbon St.) but I think they are a couple of examples that illustrate the OP…

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I agree with Manatee - while it may be possible to come up with “practical” uses for art, the best argument for the existence of art is that it makes the world a more interesting, enjoyable place to live.

BTW, do these people you’re arguing with ever watch TV dramas or comedies? Movies? Do they ever read fiction of any sort? Listen to music? Hang their kids fingerpaintings on their refrigerators? Sing in the church choir? These things are all art. I suspect they object only to art they don’t like or understand.

Art can help people understand the world in ways that would be difficult to explain otherwise. Guernica helps us understand the horror of war. MacBeth helps us understand the corrupting influence of ambition. But I don’t think art must teach anything to be worthwhile. Tocatta and Fugue in D minor by Bach is a stirring piece of music even if no one learns anything from it.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s art greatly helped physicians understand anatomy. In recent medical science discoveries in fact, it is found that his diagrams of vortices in the heart’s bloodflow were more accurate than anyone could have dreamed and they are proving this. He was an engineer, who was also an artist, so many of his surviving diagrams are still being studied. PBS made a program in which 2 of da Vinci’s diagrams were used to try to make functioning devices. Leonardo’s Dream Machines is very informative.

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Didn’t you watch How William Shatner Changed the World on the History Channel.
Seriously, Star Trek has inspired many inventions directly and indirectly inspirerd many people to work for NASA or the JPL and invent the things like robots on Mars or the Space Station.

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Art is also a valuable means of documenting passing history. Much of what we know about our past comes from studying the art created over time.

I’m currently taking an Art Education class and we’ve talked about this a lot. DOING art stimulates the brain and helps with all sorts of cognitive skills. Using art as a way to teach other subjects has also been proven to help children understand things.

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Some writers definitely influenced future scientists.

Kurd Lasswitz – seminal German science fiction writer, although, to my knowledge, only one book (seriously abridged) and two short stiories of his have appeared in English. But he was a huge influence on Werner von Braun and a lot of the engineers at Peenemunde in going into spaceflight, influenced by his stories of Mars-Earth contacts.
H.G. Wells – Leo Szilard said that he realized the importance and social significance of the atomic bomb from H.,G. Wells’ book The World set Free (which actually used the term atomic bomb).

**Robert Heinlein ** – says he invented the waterbed, and has ther acknowledgement of the “official” waterbed inventor that this was so. He also claims credit for the name “waldo” for mechanical hands (from his story “Waldo”, of course), but I’ve seen this disputed by some people who claim only science fiction writers use the term.

I’m certain there are plenty of other cases – Jules Verne must have inspired quite a few budding inventors, and there are many SF predictions that have been realized (a la the Shatner special listed above), but these are the only cases I can think of right now where someone explicitly admitted a debt to the writer.

The first one that occurred to me was da Vinci, but he’s already been listed. Da Vinci is a special case, because he was a keen observer of nature and was both an artist and an engineer. The two don’t always go together. Rembrandt, for example, gotr a lot of details of the rainbow wrong in his puicture of one. But da Vinci’s observations of light scattering are pretty much on the mark.

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One other case where the ones responsible explicityly acknowledge their debt to theartist – the nuclear submarine that passed under the North Pole was named the Nautilus, very clearly after Jules Verne’s submarine in 20,000 Leaguies Underr the Sea which went under the SDouth Pole (Verne wasn’t aware of the Antarctic continent, clearly). Previous submarines had been named Nautilus, and may also have owed a debt to Verne, but I don’;t know one way or the other.

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Actually, I learn from Wiki that Verne named his submarine after Fulton’s Nautilus, so you have life imitating art imitating life:

I also learn that the Us O-12 (SS-73) was fitted to go under the North Pole and rechristened Nautilus, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that one was renamed after Verne’s submarine as well:

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Vladimir Nabokov (everyone knows him for Lolita) escaped first from the Soviets and then from the Nazis. A lot of his writing champions freedom of the imagination/freedom of art.

Or not–his last novel in Russian, The Gift (as well as plenty of other collateral things) decries the idea that art should have a social purpose (or any purpose at all) other than to enchant readers or express the author’s imagination. Art for art’s sake, simplistically.

The Gift in particular takes aim at Chernyshevsky–a Russian pro-revolutionary writer of the 1860s–who held that it was the responsibility of all writers in all of their writings to support and further revolution in Russia. This appalled Nabokov. If artists must serve the social good, there must be a social good–which in the realm of a Stalin or a Hitler (where the state has defined social good) leads to the enslavement of the artist.

Nabokov would not have wanted to be required to defend even freedom in his works. His view was that there is no reason why art should be either practical or necessary to society, and that requiring it to be so will ultimatley kill it.

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Check out the scene in Casablanca where they sing the French anthem.

The POWs in one of the camps in N. Vietnam played bridge (made the cards out of paper, carried them around in plates with the scores marked on them in violation of camp rules).

There are a zillion examples. Art–painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama, humor, poetry, games, etc.–is what helps us stand up to the bad guys, get out of bed on the bad days, pick up the load and continue on…it inspires us in everything we do.

“applicable value to society”? There wouldn’t be a society without art. I’m not an expert, but I’d make a fairly large bet that there has never been a human society without art. And I’ll bet much of it (ever hear Chinese Opera?) would leave your “conservative, pragmatic friends,” bless their pointed little heads, rather unmoved.

On the other hand, I’ll be that stuff they like (as Jeff Lichtman suggests, it’s almost certain they indulge in something) really sucks from my point of view.

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A point that you could make is that art is a catlogue of history: a perceptional archiving of time and society itself. It’s the only time machine we have, a way to look back to the ancient and see very specifically and in a truly humanistic and empathic way all that was enveloped in the temporality of a particular seed of inspiration.

Our very origins are contained in Art, it is an urge of the mind to document our innate feelings and conceptions, and that can only be done in empathic abstracts- the domain of art. Art is permenance. Whether it be a painted picture, a sculpture, a written poem, or a dance and accompanying music for the ages. All that has come before is the culmination of Modern Art and the direct reflection of mankind as a creator. Art is creation at its most practical. It is the cipher and transport of hard earned knowledge… the carrier of all progress.

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I’ve hjust learned a bit more about Lasswitz. His writing very directly inspired the work of the German Rocket Society before WWII. Lasswitz seems to have been the first to suggest the use of attitude jets on rockets (his Martians use them to fine-position their ships, which are actually “driven” by anti-gravity). Willy Ley, a member of the society and later a prominent science writer, fondly recalled the book from his youth and suggested the use of such jets in controlling the Society’s rockets, and they even used Lasswitz’ names for them from his book Auf Zwei Planete. That’s like the makers of a new beam weapon naming it the phaser.

by the way, I have to admit to some influences like this in my own work. Several years ago I worked on a Laser Propulsion experiment, and we needed to add some easily ionizable activator to our target material. Alkali metals, because their outer electrons are so easily liberated, were ideal choices. we looked through alkali metals and their compounds, and found … Dilithium Tartrate. It wasn’t particularly promising when you crunched the numbers (and, in fact, didn’t work at all well), but at least it came in the form of crystals.
So, as far as I know, our groyup is the only one to ever really try to use Dilithium Crystals for propulsion of spacecraft. And we wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for Star Trek.

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We may not “need” art (though I believe we do…it touches people in a way technology never can), but we don’t “need” most of technology, either. Both art and science make the world a better place. There’s room for both.

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How much of the architecture in our houses wouldn’t have existed without gothic cathedrals? While palaces are also pretty big buildings, many cultures have dedicated their biggest buildings and their best architecture to God, not to whomever the local ruler was.

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The inventor of the ankle radio tracking device cited the Spider-Man comic strip as a direct inspiration. And facial transplants a la Face/Off are becoming a reality.