The Physics of Fiction: Where Science and Art Collide

We often think of art and science as opposites – one deals in facts, the other in feelings. One seeks truth, the other tells stories. But maybe that’s a false divide. Researchers at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center discuss the parallels between art and science, and the sometimes-unexpected intersections between the two pursuits. “And whether it’s art and creating a picture, or whether it’s science and creating a new model for how a disease works – and ultimately, a new model that’ll help us find a therapy for patients – we still have to create, from the beginning, something new.” “Creativity is essential to research. Answers come from a place you don’t always recognize.”

Before the submarine existed, French novelist, poet, and playwright Jules Verne imagined it in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Fiction doesn’t just reflect reality – it shapes it.

Lisa Rosenberg, an American artist and author, delves into the rich interplay between scientific inquiry and poetic imagination. “Poetry is a lab, in part because of the kinds of problem- solving that it has, that it offers. Like physics, it requires us to move fluidly between the micro, the macro, and the meta.”

Art and science are both creative fields that explore new ideas and break boundaries. “Art, and architecture, and scientific illustration, they were all part of the same process of trying to discover and explain the world around us.” Art and science are not opposites, but reflections of the same human spirit, driven by wonder, imagination, and a desire to make meaning of the world around us.