Art & Science
"Why prosthetics should be beautiful"
Science & Cooking
A very brief piece in the paper today gave some insights from science into the truth/falsity of various accepted cooking practices. The piece mentions an emerging new field combining science and cooking, and a book by one of the leaders in the field, Herve This, called Molecular Gastronomy.
Science and Cooking
This kind of thing is really, really cool. It's like MythBusters for the kitchen!
Here's an article on Heston Blumenthal who has taken this approach and applied it to his professional kitchen.
Alton Brown is another well known Chef along this vein. He's also kind of a MacGyver of cookware. My daughter has one of his books, but we haven't really experimented with it yet at this point. Per Wiki, his show "Good Eats": "a television cooking show created and hosted by Alton Brown that airs in North America on Food Network. Likened to television science educators Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye, Brown explores the science and technique behind the cooking, the history of different foods, and the advantages of different kinds of cooking equipment. The show tends to focus on familiar dishes that can easily be made at home, and also features segments on choosing the right appliances, and getting the most out of inexpensive, multi-purpose tools. Each episode of Good Eats has a distinct theme, which is typically an ingredient or a certain cooking technique, but may also be a more general theme such as Thanksgiving, or "man food"."
The Accidental Scientist has a cool webpage: Science of Cooking
They refer to it on the Federal Resources for Educational Excellence website. I wish this sort of thing was really focused on in school! I think it might help students to understand how science applies on an every day level, and how they may be scientists without really even knowing it. It's fun and rewarding. One of the coolest memories I have of 7th grade was the science experiment where we made fondant to demonstrate what a super saturated liquid was. :oP
Peter Barham has a book "The Science of Cooking" I'd love to read.
"A kitchen is no different from most science laboratories and cookery may properly be regarded as an experimental science. Food preparation and cookery involve many processes which are well described by the physical sciences. Understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking should lead to improvements in performance in the kitchen. For those of us who wish to know why certain recipes work and perhaps more importantly why others fail, appreciating the underlying physical processes will inevitably help in unravelling the mysteries of the "art" of good cooking."
French Culinary Institute has a lecture series on Kitchen Science
I'm getting all revved up again to try this stuff again!
Physics and Opera
An interview with Lisa Randall, author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, discusses her forthcoming opera. I liked what Randall had to say about why it makes sense to combine art and science:
"There are a lot of interesting and abstract concepts that science is trying to wrap its head around these days. How do you communicate those? I tried very hard to do it in the book. . . . In part, what was challenging is that you have to give a linear presentation. . . . In an opera, or a piece of art, you are not teaching something, but at least you can get across some of these important concepts in a more interesting fashion. You can have a complexity in having different thought strands, different ideas come in simultaneously."
Using Art to make better doctors
This article details the beneficial effect of a program in which Harvard Medical students take classes in art appreciation. There were three main benefits, the first of which was actually measured against a control group who did not participate in the program: 1) diagnostic skills improved due to improved observation; 2) countered the scientific mindset of trying to find the one right answer; and 3) taught students to rely less on technology for diagnosis.
Art and Mortality
Interesting article about using the arts to let Medical Students express their emotional reactions to the experience of dissecting cadavers.
Artists of Nature
Found this article about the art of insects to be really interesting in questioning the relation of nature and art--finding that it isn't representational artists but abstract artists who might be more "natural."
My ant could paint that!