“”Oh Magic Moon Over the Blue Tree” by Torley

Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa, scientist, artist, writer, poet, and designer based in India, has said, “Art and science … are two sides of the same coin.” While science is Dr. Challa’s first love, art and literature are “life itself.”

Dr. Challa, like many scientists see science as art and art as science and often inspired by each. Unfortunately, many others still see art and science as distinct and separate disciplines. Not unlike physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow, who wrote over fifty years ago there are “two cultures”:

“Physicists and writers exist, where “hostility and dislike” divide the world’s “natural scientists—its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists—from its literary intellectuals.” He found it strange that more scientists weren’t artists and musicians and more artists lacked a similar interest in the sciences. What happened to the classically trained person, he mused. In his day all these subjects were “branches of the same tree.”

The challenge of our age is to blur those lines, merge art and science, and develop the new thinking skills kids need to be creative and innovative in the wake a truly global-knowledge-economy.

Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, who authored a seminal book called Sparks of Genius, looked and at the top 150 scientists who lived over a period of 200 years and made a rather startling discovery that each was equally accomplished in the fine arts as well as the hard sciences.

To those educators lobbying for more emphasis on the sciences, they pointed out that Galileo was a poet and literary critic. Einstein was a passionate student of the violin. And Samuel Morse, the father of telecommunications and inventor of the telegraph, was a portrait painter.