SCIENCE, ART, AND EDUCATION — GIBSON 177 



trained, imaginative men, impedances in communications, or limita- 

 tions on capital for extension of facilities. (3) The diagram empha- 

 sizes the need for good communications between fundamental research 

 and engineering if we are to realize and use most effectively the cata- 

 lytic effect of understanding so necessary in a world dominated by 

 intense economic and military competition. This part will be enlarged 

 upon later. 



Figure 2 also suggests a reason why it is so difficult to define or 

 classify applied research in terms of conventional organizational con- 

 cepts. The incentives of applied research are varied, for they may 

 be either the realization of a need or a market, or the conviction that a 

 new idea may, upon conversion to practice, create a need or a market. 

 The chief products of apjjlied research are commodities, but under- 

 standing is a byproduct. Applied research bridges the gap between 

 activities carried out for intellectual satisfaction and those whose 

 aims are materialistic. Nor is it remarkable that such an activity 

 eludes simple definition and organization; applied research can per- 

 haps best be described as teamwork between those who think and those 

 who do. 



Perhaps the outstanding contribution of the Western nations to 

 civilization is the application of natural philosophy to accelerate and 

 extend the progress of the useful arts. The increase in the productive 

 capacity of the individual worker, achieved in these nations through 

 technology, has made possible for the majority of their populations 

 a standard of material welfare unequaled in the history of man. 



SCIENCE AND CREATIVE ART 



Art and science have come to be regarded as entirely separate and 

 even antagonistic human activities. Indeed, there has grown up a 

 legend which represents the scientist as a cold-blooded, objective 

 dealer in facts and figures, whose imagination, if any, is narrow and 

 distorted, a man with whom esthetic sensibilities are not associated, 

 and who possesses a "scientific mind,'' a relentless logical machine 

 endowed with undefined mental characteristics beyond the reach of 

 ordinary humanity. At the same time, the artist is associated with 

 loose living and looser thinking, a genius dealing with abstractions 

 from the penumbra of human experience, whose creations are entirely 

 subjective in meaning, luxuries rather than necessities in the world 

 of reality. I need hardly add that both these legends are quite 

 misleading. 



A very significant change is in progress; the kinship between the 

 creative artist and the scientist is being rediscovered and reaffirmed, 

 and scientists, it seems, are taking the initiative in this movement. 



