Science and Art
The Two Faces of BeautyScience and art are both manifestations of beauty and creativity. As mankind has evolved intellectually and socially and as science has progressed, artistic creations by humans have tended towards increasing harmony with nature and they have become more abstract―like mathematics, which is the abstraction of all sciences
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The eight theses that relate to science and art, and their rationale presented in this book, are a culmination of observations, conversations, readings, ideas exchanged, and thoughts that span a journey of six decades.
Evidence to support these theses is drawn from mathematics, physics, studies in molecular biology, and also from music, fine art and design. Readers are taken through lucid prose with the help of illustrations of natural phenomenon such as spiral galaxies, spider web, the Fibonacci series and fractals in lightning, and of products of human creativity such as paintings of masters like Picasso, M F Husain and Escher, musical pieces, textile fragments and Ajanta caves frescoes.
The accompanying DVD is a reproduction of two light-and-sound shows held in Hyderabad of artist M F Husain’s 25 paintings on some of the most important events of the last century with their description as written by Dr Bhargava. The music on the CD was created by Susumu Ohno, a distinguished American geneticist, by converting the language of DNA― the genetic material―into the language of music.
Pushpa Mittra Bhargava is among India’s most reputed scientists and is widely regarded as the architect of modern biology and biotechnology in the country. The founder-director of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology situated in Hyderabad, India, he is also a writer, thinker, and consultant. Bhargava has authored five books, and has over 125 major scientific publications to his credit, as well as over 500 articles covering a wide spectrum of knowledge. He is a recipient of over 100 national and international honours and awards including the Padma Bhushan, the Legion d'honneur and the National Citizens Award India.
Trained as a scientist, Chandana Chakrabarti is also a communications expert, actor, columnist and writer, whose writings have covered a variety of fields and issues. Chakrabarti played a major role in setting up of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad. She co-authored two books with P M Bhargava and wrote a popular column for Deccan Chronicle, a widely circulated newspaper of South India. She has also acted in Telugu films.
Maqbool Fida Husain was one of the most celebrated and internationally recognized Indian artists of the 20th century. With a career spanning several decades, he made significant contributions in other foelds as well―as a photographer, filmmaker and member of the Indian Parliament. A member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group in the 1940s and ’50s, Husain shared P M Bhargava’s penchant of making irrelevant the man-made boundaries which separate one area of knowledge from the other.
Susumu Opno, an American scientist of Japanese origin, was a geneticist and molecular biologist renowned for his pioneering work in areas of evolution through gene duplication and genetic sex determination. Following his basic belief that all of nature is characterized by repetition, in 1986 Ohno converted gene coding to musical scores by assigning notes (building blocks of music) to nucleotides (building blocks of DNA). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976 and to the US National Academy of Sciences in 1981, besides being conferred many other coveted honours and awards.
• Introduction
• Definitions
• The theses
• The first thesis
• The second thesis
• The third, fourth and fifth theses
• The sixth thesis
• The seventh thesis
• The eighth thesis
• Conclusions
• Limitations
• References
• Other resources
• Acknowledgements
| ISBN | 9788189995690 |
| Pages | 84 |
| Number of illustrations | 66 |
| Size | 7 x 8.75" (178 x 222 mm), hc with CD and DVD |
| Date of Publishing | 2014 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Co-publisher(s) | Mapin |
| Rights Available | World rights |