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 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 Cheshire 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. 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, in 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've seen, 3D weaving, TV programs like Tracker, and Enterprise, CD rewrite, Drives, Flatscreen, Alvin Ailey's Sweet Otis, or Sarah Jones, Your Revolution Will Not Be Between the 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 are purposefully, consciously being laggards. We're lagging behind. Frantz Fanon, who was a psychiatrist in 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, when 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 underlie our teaching, and when 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 have 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 spans 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, you know, 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 a prime director 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 love the arts and sciences. You see, when I was growing up as a little girl and as a teenager, I loved designing and making doll clothes and wanting to be a fashion designer. I took art and ceramics. I love dance. Lola Felana, 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, 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 to go to medical school? Now my mother helped me figure that one out. 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, who you can figure out now, I love the dance company, an Alvin Ailey poster of Judith Jameson performing the dance Cry, dedicated to all black women everywhere, a boondoo 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 sources, imagination and analysis it took to carve a boondoo 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 equals mc squared, required and intuitively, and then you have to do the analysis afterwards. Einstein said, in fact, the most beautiful thing we can experience is a mysterious. It is a 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, subatomic 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 sculptures, 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. 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 a experience by everyone. And the arts manifest our desire, our attempt to share, our 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, do, you know, the mathematics and the numerical stuff and the statistics, because we heard very much on this stage people talk 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 brain or left brain at some point in time, depending on who we disagree with. 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 that you all don't know what I'm talking about. We had the, we had folks talking about the flat earth society and flower rangers. 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'd really be foolish to choose either one, right? Intuitive versus analytical. That's a foolish choice. It's foolish just like trying to choose between being realistic or idealistic. You need both in life. Why do people do this? I'm just going to quote a molecular biologist, Sidney Brenner, who's 70 years old, so he can say this. He said, it's always important to distinguish between chastity and impotence. Now, I want to share with you, I want to share with you a little equation, okay? How do understanding science and the arts fit into our lives and what's going on and the things that we're talking about here at the design conference? And this is a little thing I came up with. Understanding and our resources and our will cause us to have outcomes. Our understanding is our science, our arts, our religion, how we see the universe around us. Our resources, our money, our labor, our minerals, those things that are out there in the world that we have to work with. But more importantly, there's our will. This is our vision, our aspirations of the future, our hopes, our dreams, our struggles, and our fears, our successes and our failures influence what we do with all of those. And to me, design and engineering, craftsmanship and skilled labor are all the things that work on this to have our outcome, which is our human quality of life. Let me finish by saying that my personal design issue for the future is really about integrating, to think about that intuitive and that analytical. The arts and sciences are not separate. High school physics lesson before we leave, high school physics teacher used to hold up a ball. She would say this ball has potential energy, but nothing will happen to it. It can't do any work until I drop it and it changes states. I like to think of ideas as potential energy. They're really wonderful, but nothing will happen until we risk putting them into action. This conference is filled with wonderful ideas. We're going to share lots of things with people, but nothing's going to happen until we risk putting those ideas into action. We need to revitalize the arts and sciences today. We need to take responsibility for the future. We can't hide behind saying it's just for company profits, or it's just a business, or I'm an artist, or an academician. Here's how you judge what you're doing. I talked about that balance between intuitive, analytical. Fran Lebowitz, my favorite cynic, she said the three questions of greatest concern that I'm going to add on to design is, is it attractive? That's the intuitive. Is it amusing? The analytical. And does it know its place? The balance. Thank you very much. The first TED I came to, the product that they used to support the speakers on stage was somebody else's furniture. I thought we could do a better job of actually enabling the setting to be cooler, to have a different kind of vibe. The goal was to try and design it so that they would just by randomness show up when they weren't in the theater into the simulcast space and use that as a place to lounge, to interact, to get together. And then what we did is populate the space with tools that we thought that would enable them to continue the discussions that they heard in the theater. As we've learned that the simulcast could be adjacent to the theater and build a great experience, we decided that we could move it further away, first to Aspen and now to Palm Springs, and try and recreate it connected through HD quality video and the kind of furniture environment we're talking about. We can create an extended team space. I, in running a big company, gain a ton by being here. I mean, without the opportunity to use our products to help make it better, I would be coming. But because I can then connect my learning and the products to the site, I then get interaction and feedback from lots of people that use it, and it helps stimulate the next generations of what we might create.