(Image: T. Tan/BEI/Rex Features)
How does art inspire science? It may seem a difficult question to answer with any empirical evidence, but in a new research project Scottish scientists aim to do just that.
Launched yesterday, What Scientists Read? will aim to find out what influence literature has on scientists and the decisions they make.
Asking questions like “how does reading literature affect scientific thought and practice?” and “does reading literature affect the career decision to become a scientist?”, the project team will conduct interviews with scientists in Scotland to try to unravel the influence on science of the creative arts.
Fear not, though. Even if you’re ruled out of the interviews due to geographical disadvantages you can still take part in the study. The project’s website hosts a forum where any scientist can go and add to the discussion.
The launch of the project is great timing. At the crossroads between science and art there has long been debate about how the arts feed back into scientific research - whether as a justification for the art or for the funding - but for CultureLab nothing is going to be as compelling as some cold, hard scientific fact.
No comments:
Post a Comment