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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Separation between art, science lacks
authenticity
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF hho@media.ucla.edu Next to Knudsen Hall, Franz Hall and the Inverted Fountain, home to physics, astronomy and psychology, lies Schoenberg Hall, home of the music department. It seems that placing Schoenberg Hall on the cusp of North and South may have been the best case of going into foreign territory up until Nixon in China. But upon closer examination, music (and maybe the entire artistic enterprise) belongs with its Einstein-worshipping pocket-protecting cohorts. The division of art and science curriculum is a silly remnant of 1950s college education, where students were factory-made for entry into corporate America. Everything was systematized into stages and tests, and instead of learning and experiencing, you merely graduated. Rather than force-fed facts, it's the wonder of experience, of seeing the Leonid meteors crashing into the atmosphere, and curiosity that makes good scientists. Art certainly helps create that while science makes new art possible. Let's dissect. Ideas about music often originate from science. Pythagoras, the ancient Greek guy who made those theorems about triangles, also made it possible to have complex stringed instruments (such as guitars) and acoustics with his overtone series. Musical notation represents mathematical fractions in time, where the player must count beats. Even Arnold Schoenberg of Schoenberg Hall thought music might benefit from being based on 12-note formulas that were later used to generate entire pieces of music like a quadratic equation generating a parabola. There's more. In 1980, Douglas Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, "Godel Escher Bach." Hofstadter compared the work of mathematician Kurt Godel with that of artist M.C. Escher and composer J.S. Bach. Godel found that any complex system can never be completely proven. While he used math to prove this idea, it's not a far stretch to place Godel's nihilistic musings in a North Campus philosophy class. Godel's idea means that computers know only what we tell them and that you can never fully know yourself. The connection between science and Bach is clearer when you look at Bach's final work, "The Art of Fugue." Bach created music that could be played both right-side up and mirrored upside-down (if "mod" was mirrored upside-down, it would look like "pow"). Both versions of music are different and equally beautiful, the same way molecules can have different properties when their atoms are positioned in a mirror image. Bach may not have known math or molecules, but his musical games hail from the spirit of South Campus. Scientist Carl Sagan decided putting Bach's music into a space capsule would constitute showing off to aliens if they ever found it. With interdisciplinary studies emerging, the arts and sciences will no longer needlessly be divided at birth. They should be the brothers they once were. Chaos mathematics presents a nice place where that's happening. It produces fractals, swirling images that look like abstract tree branches on crack. With visuals this attractive, science is becoming artsy (yes, there is hope for South Campus yet). In 1972, meteorologist Edward Lorenz coined the Butterfly Effect, where a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. This is based on chaos math, where very simple equations produce chaotic results based on the "initial conditions," in this case, the butterfly's flapping. However, 20 years earlier, Ray Bradbury had already written a short story "A Sound of Thunder," where a prehistoric butterfly's death affects the outcome of a modern presidential election. Coincidences between what science discovers and what art intuits is no mistake; they're signs of a culture's intellectual health. Ho's North Campus Avenger column runs Mondays. |
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