The Art of Science
Toward the end of The Substance of Style, I introduce a theme that will become more and more prominent in the coming years: the re-emergence of a pre-Romantic, or Renaissance, attitude toward the complementarity of art, science, and technology: "The burgeoning demand for aesthetic expertise overturns the cultural assumptions we've inherited from the romantics, who opposed art to technology and feeling to rationality; from the modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from the efficiency experts, who equated function with value and variety with waste. In the age of look and feel, technology and art cooperate."
As if to illustrate this point, Princeton recently held a contest called The Art of Science, inviting students, faculty, and staff "to submit imagery produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science." The 55 entries selected for the exibition are now online, and they're impressively diverse and beautiful.
Here, for instance, is one from operations research, a truly unromantic (but really important) discipline.
Check out the whole gallery here.