Welcome

Welcome to Creativity in Science and the Arts, a distance-learning course that I convened at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), University of Southern Maine, in Spring term, 2020.

I left the basic assignments behind for anyone curious about the course resources.

Weekly Announcements
Click the link above, or the Weekly Announcements link in the right-hand column, to see information about each weekly, two-hour meeting.

Course Description

Creativity in the humanities raises this question: Is science also creative in any sense that parallels the arts, or is science mere discovery? For answers, we will ask how scientists work; specifically, how they investigate the invisible — detecting particles like quarks and the Higgs boson; “seeing” molecules; studying magnetic and gravitational fields; imaging black holes; determining how and to what extent our climate is changing; and exploring unrepeatable processes like evolution. In each case, we begin with a creative work of poetry, music, literature, or art — and then move toward connecting it to a scientific idea. Can I convince you that scientists are creative, too? Let me try.

I provide all readings and other learning tools at One Culture:Science and the Humanities, my website for promoting science and for exploring connections between science and other ways of knowing.

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Here are brief introductions to the resources for this course. They contain much more material than we will use in this course. Announcements will always link you directly to what I hope you will study in preparation for class. So don't get lost in the mazes of these larger resources, but DO browse around --- you might find something interesting.

1) How Scientists Know

The need and opportunity for imagination and creativity emerges in many ways in science. For the general public, one of the least widely understood ways is in finding the means to "see" -- that is, to sense or detect or measure or infer -- something heretofore unseeable, or something thought perhaps to exist, but not of certain existence. Each of the pages of How Scientists Know presents one element of our universe that we can never see directly, but that we know because flashes of insight or unexpected results of experiments gave scientists hints of its existence. Examples of such elements are genes, electromagnetic radiation, and climate change.

2) Reflections on Science and the Humanities

Reflections... provides essays on connections between science and other forms of knowledge, including literature, art, and music. These essays should help you to understand science better, and thus equip you to recognize the many parallels we might draw between science and the more familiar -- to most people -- products of the arts.

3) Poetry and Science

Poetry... provides poems and literary excerpts used to illuminate specific scientific concepts. Some of these literary works also make cameo appearances in Reflections... .

I hope you find these materials readable and useful. I welcome your comments and suggestions about them.

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