Art and Science are the twin poles of human exploration. Art represents the human soul, emotion, the intangible immeasurable emergent quality that drives inspiration and fuels religious wars. Science is Man’s endeavor to measure the world that surrounds him in order to reduce it to its component parts, disassemble those parts, and put them back together in his own image.

Art is the opposite of Science, and Science is the opposite of Art. You can’t define Science in terms of Art, nor Art in terms of Science. It makes no more sense to describe the beauty of a painting in terms of electron shell interactions than it does to describe network packet switching in terms of Shakespearean character flaws. Science deals in the concrete, while Art deals in the abstract. One-to-one transliteration between the two just doesn’t work.

And yet, it is still possible — and in fact illuminating — to apply the general approaches of one discipline to solve problems in the opposite discipline. For example (the Science of Art), the same low level analytical techniques that work so well in software engineering can be applied to music composition theory to explore the complex interactions between modal scales and chords. Conversely (the Art of Science), the coveted intuitive leap so commonly practiced in Art can circumvent a seemingly intractable software problem by side-stepping old, logical assumptions and jumping directly to a cleaner, less obvious solution.

The paradox of these two bipolar concepts is a rich and largely untapped source of power for the intrepid Human Explorer. A full, balanced life pulls equally from both disciplines, using Art to illuminate Science, and using Science to introduce structure into Art.