Re: OT:is software eng an art?

Phil Tomson wrote:

> I like this...  Again, there is an intersection between engineering and
> creativity (art).

Yah.  I think I was trying to say that, IMHO, engineering is the point of 
intersection between art and (perhaps I should say "hard") science.

> Scientific theories do change from age to age - it's not a static
> endeavor.  The ancient Greek
> scientists viewed the universe much differently than we do now.  Look at
> how physics has changed in the last 100 years with the advent of
> relativity theory, quantum physics, uncertainty - it looks much different
> than it did
> 100 years ago and it influences how we view the universe.  100 years from
> now I suspect that things will look much different from the way they do
> now.

Theories are certainly a part of science, and this is probably where the art 
of science comes into play.  However, science as "laws of nature" is not 
open to interpretation.  The laws that governed the Greeks haven't changed.  
Pythagorus' theorem is still relevant.  What they thought the /causes/ were 
are different, but the measured, recorded events are the same.  Math /is/ 
universal, and unchanging -- as far as we know.

One last illustration of my point: astronomy.  Remember the complex, 
pre-Galileo model of the solar system?  The model was wrong, and even the 
rules that predicted where heavenly bodies would be located weren't very 
accurate, but the basic science itself was not open to interpretation.  
There was a thing called Mars, and it moved about in the sky, and the task 
was to figure out how, or at least by what rules.  The "why" will always be 
a mystery (unless we find out when we die) but the "hows" we can more or 
less answer, with increasing accuracy as our science evolves.

There are no "answers" for Art.  Only questions.  Ooooooh.  Deeeeeep.

:-)

> Perhaps, and I don't disagree with you in principle, but think of how the
> term 'Science' has changed in the last 50 years.  In the '50s (which I

Hmm.  Or even further.  The "science" of medicine in the middle ages.

> religious.  There was an almost religious feeling that 'Science' would
> overcome all of our societal and physical ills.  There were ad campaigns

Heh.  Perhaps it will, when psychology and other social sciences catch up to 
the physical sciences.

> in the US find that phrase to be kind of quaint in it's outlook. Now we
> have more of a feelling that 'Science' is fallable.

Yes.  Does the public perception of the fallability of science in any way 
affect it's validity?

> Yes, I've recently been attending a music theory class and I have to say
> that intuitively there seems to be something just under the surface
> which seems very similar to mathemetics....

There are a number of papers that have been done on this.  I don't really 
know enough about it, though, which is probably why it still interesting 
;-)

> Well, we tend to be composed of engineers and scientists, but perhaps we
> need to try to get more artists interested and see what happens...

Heh.  I'm a professional software developer, myself; any science I do is 
strictly incidental.  On top of that, even when provided with a perfectly 
servicable spell-checker, I routinely forget to use it.  When I went 
through college, the CS program wasn't part of the Engineering program, so 
I can't call myself an engineer, either.  I'm depressingly un-nerdy, and I 
don't wear hiking boots to work, nor do I dress in black or am overweight.  
I do, however, write a lot of open-source software, and firmly believe 
that, had I been born before computers, I would have been either an 
architect or a carpenter.  And I spend way too much money on gadgets, but 
if there's one common trait amongst programmers, I'd place my money on 
that.

--- SER