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While my poem was composed to demonstrate a personal perspective, in many ways I was merely trying to be clever, presenting a logical argument in a classical form. For the most part I thought a comparison between Dante and Thomson would be cute, seeing as they both spoke of the eventual heat death of the universe.

But as you have decided to “elevate” this dialogue to the plane of well-composed essay, I shall respond in prose as well. Although if you want me to represent calculus in iambic pentameter, I am certainly up to the challenge. Perhaps this deserves a weekly spot in the humor section?
At the core of my ramblings is the belief that while science and art have intrinsic differences, the classical and romantic ways of thinking are both useful modes, as they provide differing, yet equally valuable, perspectives on a given situation. Or, seeing as you enjoy speaking in layman’s terms, the artistic approach to science and the scientific approach to art can give relevant results.

Though I am usually opposed to the mention of Einstein in scientific discussion, as his intelligence has become a stock example in the dialogue of the uneducated, I find his methods of thinking relevant.

Einstein did not work from equations; he started with pictures of trains and stories of lightening, working the images until they became numerically feasible. It was not a strictly analytical approach; it was distinctly imaginative, and his resulting theories were intuitive and beautiful, as well as being experimentally sound.

Other scientists, such as Schrödinger and Faraday, relied more on theory than equation, and this “looser” approach provided some important and unexpected theories that could not have been discovered without imaginative and artistic thinking.

And it goes both ways. Brilliant artists like Leonardo Da Vinci or Jules Verne can imagine scientific advances years in the future, serving as a guide to the engineers of younger generations.

But how can the scientific vision be applied to artistry? In your editorial, you state that some scientists “just like playing with smelly chemicals in test tubes, which most artists are uninterested in doing.” I would contest this wholeheartedly. I believe that literary skill is often dependent on the mixture of strong, one might even say “smelly,” personalities in “testy” situations. I hope you will pardon my fondness for bad puns.

A seemingly innocuous chemical such as Nick Caraway can create a combustion reaction when mixed with something as volatile as Jay Gatsby. Writers can work wonders with the changing effects of pressure (think Jude the Obscure or Lord of the Flies) or temperature (Heart of Darkness or Ethan Frome), and classics frequently experiment with isolated systems like one Old Man on the Sea.

In short, a true intellectual should not limit herself to one mode of thinking. As both an artist and a scientist, I find that while The Elements of Style and The Scientific Method do not complete each other, they are surely complimentary, and can enrich my mind even more when they play off one another.

Finally, while you may not believe cultural literacy necessary in speaking to non-scientists, concise and ordered rhetoric is appreciated in all writing, even that in the Tech.