Bring Art and Science Back Together

In the UK, Guardian paper, there is an article “Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, condemns British education system”. Schmidt criticizes division between science and arts and says UK 'should look back to glory days of Victorian era.


When it comes to poetry and the literary arts I am not very well versed. However growing up my family was very artistic. My one uncle taught me the piano for a while, another uncle taught me how to carve and dream and to appreciate the CBC, an aunt that attempted to teach me how to write properly and make it look good (which I failed at miserably), an aunt that taught me how to figure skate till I was in grade 8 and my father a farmer and a canoe builder which requires a huge amount wood working talent and artistic ability. When I went to school, my course load was always math and science, very little of the arts except mandatory subjects. I did however have an artistic home life.

When I think about it, the majority of engineers I know that are very good do have a creative / artistic side to them. Some of the smartest number crunching engineers I have ever met have been from the former east block Europe countries. They could crunch numbers and analyze things, however I found once they figured out something was not strong enough or had a problem, they could not figure out how to redesign and solve the problem. I believe their education system pushed them very hard academically to be great math and science brains; however the art / design side was missing. So I think maybe the artical is partially correct, but I would say there are good engineers that cannot design and there are good artistic people that can design but cannot engineer. I propose that someone with both engineering and an artistic side is what I would call an inventor. You do not hear about people being called inventors anymore. I consider myself an inventor, it is the best way to describe what we do at Industrial Revolution to win orders. We invent ways to manufacture product for our customers.

Some of the passages of interest from the article are pasted below:

“You need to bring art and science back together."

"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."


Schmidt's comments echoed sentiments expressed by Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, who revealed he was stepping down this week. "The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians – who also happened to be excellent computer scientists," Jobs once told the New York Times.