Perhaps you've just read the previous sentence, and asked: Whaddya talkin' about, Steve? Was there some time when science and art actually got along?
Oh yes. The time was up until the eighteenth century, and can perhaps be seen most dramatically in Western civilization -- I really don't have much of a clue about non-Western civilizations, but I'm trying to catch up -- in the example of philosophy, and of individual philosophers. Up until a few centuries ago, the leading philosophers were also the leading mathematicians and scientists, and people generally took for granted that this was so. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz were the leading philosophers and the leading mathematicians of their time. Newton was a leading scientist and mathematician, but he left scarcely a mark in what today is generally considered to be philosophy. The split seems to be beginning already in Newton's time. Kant, Schopenahuer, Marx, Nietzsche and the other most prominent 19th-century philosophers are not, to my knowledge, enthusiastically read today by most scientists. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were prominent 20th-century mathematicians and philosophers, but they were very unusual in being both at the same time. In the 21st century, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse and Lawrence Krauss Tyson have said that philosophy is worthless, without causing much of an uproar among their fellow scientists, which shows you how little you can know about philosophy today and still be a brilliant scientist.
My brother, an engineer, goes probably even farther than Hawking and deGrasse Tyson and Krauss in his ignorant dismissal of philosophy -- and that's all this is: ignorance. If Hawking or deGrasse Tyson or Krauss or my brother knew very much at all about philosophy, they wouldn't say such things.
This unfortunate split, this destructive antagonism between two vital types of human endeavor is not, of course, all the fault of the scientists. Those who have objected to the dismissal philosophy by prominent scientists have included other prominent scientists. And it's certainly not as if all philosopher, artists, musicians, poets etc, have a decent appreciation of STEM. There is plenty of fault on both sides of the split.
I've tried to bring the sciences and the humanities back together, but I could've done much more. I stopped studying math in school just as soon as I was allowed to stop studying it, after completing 10th-grade geometry. I usually had the best math grades in my class -- the only exception I can remember was in 9th-grade algebra. The teacher posted a constantly-updated list of the members of the class by our current grade. I don't remember whether A was 90% and up, or 94% and up, or what exactly. I do remember that it was possible to score above 100% with extra-credit work, and that the 2 of us at the top of the list were over 100%, and that I wasn't on top. That felt very strange, not being the best math student in sight.
That 9th-grade algebra teacher, and some other math teachers I had, talked to me very excitedly about how far I would be able to go in math. They didn't realize that I didn't enjoy math at all. It was my undiagnosed autism which allowed me to make those grades without trying and without being interested.
The 9th grade was 45 years ago. Since then I've made a few feeble attempts to make more progress in math, which, it seems to me, would amount to developing an interest in and enjoyment of math. I was talking to a math teacher the other day, and he said, You have to enjoy math to go far in it.
My brother was valedictorian in high school and got 2 degrees from MIT. He enjoys math. During one of those periods when I was trying to develop an enjoyment, my brother gave me his copy of the 5th edition of Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas and Finney, one of his former MIT textbooks. He's a good brother, even though he is an appalling philistine when it comes to the arts.
Pages 355 through 362 of this book are missing. Did my brother remove these pages before giving me the book? Are there things on pages 355 to 362 which, my brother decided, must remain hidden from librul artistic types such as me?
I still haven't made that big breakthrough, to where I enjoy math. Although, in the past year or so, chess, mildly interesting to me already for decades, has become much more interesting, and a large part of chess, or maybe all of it, is math. (Well, no, not all of it. There's also psychology in sizing up one's opponent.)
And when people like Melvin Schwarz -- co-recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics -- are writing about things like vectors, I actually understand part of it. So, hey, lookit that, I actually have learned some calculus! Schwarz also writes things like: "Electromagnetic theory is beautiful!" And I believe him even thought I still don't understand it.
And I still want to understand. So that I can enjoy math at last, and for many other reasons.
Who knows: maybe, if I understand things like advanced physics, I'll become much better at helping people like Neil deGrasse Tyson appreciate things like existentialism.
