Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together

What I want to do today is to spend some time talking about some stuff that's sort of giving me a little bit of existential angst, for lack of a better word, over the past couple of years, and basically, these three quotes tell what's going on. "When God made the color purple, God was just showing off," Alice Walker wrote in "The Color Purple," and Zora Neale Hurston wrote in "Dust Tracks On A Road," "Research is a formalized curiosity. It's poking and prying with a purpose." And then finally, when I think about the near future, you know, we have this attitude, well, whatever happens, happens. Right? So that goes along with the Chesire Cat saying, "If you don't care much where you want to get to, it doesn't much matter which way you go." But I think it does matter which way we go, and what road we take, because when I think about design in the near future, what I think are the most

important issues, what's really

crucial and vital is that we need to revitalize the arts and sciences right now in 2002. (Applause) If we describe the near future as 10, 20, 15 years from now, that means that what we do today is going to be critically important, because in the year 2015, and the year 2020, 2025, the world our society is going to be building on, the basic knowledge and abstract ideas, the discoveries that we came up with today, just as all these wonderful things we're hearing about here at the TED conference that we take for granted in the world right now, were really knowledge and ideas that came up in the '50s, the '60s, and the '70s. That's the substrate that we're exploiting today, whether it's the internet, genetic engineering, laser scanners, guided missiles, fiber optics, high-definition television, sensing, remote-sensing from space and the wonderful remote-sensing photos that we see in 3D weaving, TV programs like Tracker,

and Enterprise, CD rewrite drives, flatscreen, Alvin Ailey's Suite Otis, or Sarah Jones' "Your Revolution Will Not Be Between These Thighs," which by the way was banned by the FCC, or ska, all of these things without question, almost without exception, are really based on ideas and abstract and creativity from years before, so we have to ask ourselves, what are we contributing to that legacy right now? And when I think about it, I'm really worried. To be quite frank, I'm concerned. I'm skeptical that we're doing very much of anything. We're, in a sense, failing to act in the future. We're purposefully, consciously being laggards.

We're lagging behind. Frantz Fanon, who was a psychiatrist from Martinique, said, "Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill or betray it." What is our mission? What do we have to do? I think our mission is to reconcile, to reintegrate science and the arts, because right now there's a schism that exists in popular culture. You know, people have this idea that science and the arts are really separate. We think of them as separate and different things, and this idea was probably introduced centuries ago, but it's really becoming critical now, because we're making decisions about our society every day that, if we keep thinking that the arts are separate from the sciences,

and we keep thinking it's cute to say, "I don't understand anything about this one, I don't understand anything about the other one," then we're going to have problems. Now I know no one here at TED thinks this. All of us, we already know that they're very connected, but I'm going to let you know that some folks in the outside world, believe it or not, they think it's neat when they say,

"You know, scientists and science is not creative. Maybe scientists are ingenious, but they're not creative. And then we have this tendency, the career counselors and various people say things like, "Artists are not analytical. They're ingenious, perhaps, but not analytical," and when these concepts underly our teaching and what we think about the world, then we have a problem, because we stymie support for everything. By accepting this dichotomy, whether it's tongue-in-cheek, when we attempt to accommodate it in our world, and we try to build our foundation for the world, we're messing up the future, because, who wants to be uncreative? Who wants to be illogical? Talent would run from either of these fields if you said you had to choose either. Then they're going to go to something

where they think, "Well, I can be creative and logical at the same time." Now I grew up in the '60s and I'll admit it, actually, my childhood spanned the '60s, and I was a wannabe hippie and I always resented the fact that I wasn't really old enough to be a hippie. And I know there are people here, the younger generation who want to be hippies, but people talk about the '60s all the time, and they talk about the anarchy that was there, but when I think about the '60s, what I took away from it was that there was hope for the future. We thought everyone could participate. There were wonderful, incredible ideas that were always percolating, and so much of what's cool or hot today is really based on some of those concepts, whether it's, you know, people trying to use the prime directive from Star Trek being involved in things, or again that three-dimensional weaving and fax machines that I read about in my weekly readers that the technology and engineering was just getting started. But the '60s left me with a problem. You see, I always assumed I would go into space, because I followed all of this,

but I also loved the arts and sciences. You see, when I was growing up as a little girl and as a teenager, I loved designing and making dogs' clothes and wanting to be a fashion designer. I took art and ceramics. I loved dance. Lola Falana. Alvin Ailey. Jerome Robbins. And I also avidly followed the Gemini and the Apollo programs. I had science projects and tons of astronomy books. I took calculus and philosophy. I wondered about the infinity and the Big Bang theory. And when I was at Stanford, I found myself, my senior year, chemical engineering major, half the folks thought I was a political science and performing arts major, which was sort of true because I was Black Student Union President and I did major in some other things, and I found myself the last quarter juggling chemical engineering separation processes,

logic classes, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and also producing and choreographing a dance production, and I had to do the lighting and the design work, and I was trying to figure out, do I go to New York City to try to become a professional dancer, or do I go to medical school? Now, my mother helped me figure that one out. (Laughter) But when I went into space, when I went into space I carried a number of things up with me. I carried a poster by Alvin Ailey, which you can figure out now, I love the dance company. An Alvin Ailey poster of Judith Jamison performing the dance "Cry," dedicated to all black women everywhere. A Bundu statue, which was from the Women's Society in Sierra Leone, and a certificate for the Chicago Public School students to work to improve their science and math, and folks asked me, "Why did you take up what you took up?" And I had to say, "Because it represents human creativity,

the creativity that allowed us, that we were required to have to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage "Cry." Each one of them are different manifestations, incarnations, of creativity, avatars of human creativity, and that's what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together. The difference between arts and sciences is not analytical versus intuitive, right? E=MC squared required an intuitive leap, and then you had to do the analysis afterwards. Einstein said, in fact, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Dance requires us to express and want to express the jubilation in life, but then you have to figure out, exactly what movement do I do to make sure that it comes across correctly?

The difference between arts and sciences is also not constructive versus deconstructive, right? A lot of people think of the sciences as deconstructive. You have to pull things apart. And yeah, sub-atomic physics is deconstructive. You literally try to tear atoms apart to understand what's inside of them. But sculpture, from what I understand from great sculptors, is deconstructive, because you see a piece and you remove what doesn't need to be there.

Biotechnology is constructive. Orchestral arranging is constructive. So in fact we use constructive and deconstructive techniques in everything. The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin, even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather they're manifestations of the same thing. Different quantum states of an atom? Or maybe if I want to be more 21st century I could say that they are different harmonic resonances of a superstring. But we'll leave that alone. (Laughter) They spring from the same source.

The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us. It's our attempt to influence things, the universe internal to ourselves and external to us. The sciences, to me, are manifestations of our attempt to express or share our understanding, our experience, to influence the universe external to ourselves. It doesn't rely on us as individuals. It's the universe, as experienced

by everyone, and the arts manifest our desire, our attempt to share or influence others through experiences that are peculiar to us as individuals. Let me say it again another way: science provides an understanding of a universal experience, and arts provides a universal understanding of a personal experience. That's what we have to think about, that they're all part of us, they're all part of a continuum. It's not just the tools, it's not just the sciences, you know, the mathematics and the numerical stuff and the statistics, because we heard, very much on this stage, people talked about music being mathematical. Right? Arts don't just use clay, aren't the only ones that use clay, light and sound and movement. They use analysis as well.

So people might say, well, I still like that intuitive versus analytical thing, because everybody wants to do the right brain, left brain thing, right? We've all been accused of being right-brained or left-brained at some point in time, depending on who we disagreed with. (Laughter) You know, people say intuitive, you know that's like you're in touch with nature, in touch with yourself and relationships. Analytical: you put your mind to work, and I'm going to tell you a little secret. You all know this though, but sometimes people use this analysis idea, that things are outside of ourselves, to be, say, that this is what we're going to elevate as the true, most important sciences, right? And then you have artists, and you all know this is true as well, artists will say things about scientists because they say they're too concrete,

they're disconnected with the world. But, we've even had that here on stage, so don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. (Laughter) We had folks talking about the Flat Earth Society and flower arrangers, so there's this whole dichotomy that we continue to carry along, even when we know better. And folks say we need to choose either or. But it would really be foolish to choose either one, right?