FET 2009 Eve Mitleton-Kelly
Aesthetics at the Heart of Science
FET Prague, 2009 April 23
Adaptive complex systems needs a much more imaginative, daring, and audacious new generation of scientific fields and scientists for observing and reconstructing multiscale emergence, which has all kinds of bottom up and top down causalities. The beauty of their functional and adaptive mechanisms at all levels is a permanent source of surprise and fascination. Such an aesthetic response has to be understood because it is essential for designing elegant new mathematical and computational formalisms for modelling these mechanisms, for understanding and teaching them, and communicating them towards the whole population of all ages. As Einstein said, aesthetics is as important as logic for deep science. But it is not just aesthetics. Art can be brutal, ugly and shocking. Artist can pose questions we don’t want to ask and suggest things that we don’t want to know. Artists make massive jumps to take us to places in conceptual space that we never dreamed possible. Art is generally in the vanguard of human thinking. Is science stuck in a rut? Can science learn from the methods of artist, with art being part of the new science?
Documents
/db/pdf/fet2009/transcript_fet2009_eve_mitleton.pdf [PDF]
