From The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems (1986) by Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter H. Richter (1986)-
“Science and art are two complementary ways of knowing nature, analytical and intuitive. We are accustomed to think of them as opposite poles, but do they not depend on each other? The thinker who tries to comprehend in his mind the phenomena of nature, trying to reduce their complexity to a small number of fundamental laws – is he not also a dreamer, immersed in the richness of forms and perceiving himself as part of the eternal roundelay of natural phenomena?
This sense of community that each of us can experience is not reflected in the cultural history of the last two centuries. As if feeling too constrained by the limits of a unified soul, the spirit of art and the spirit of science have become divided. The unified Faust has become two one-dimensional entities. This separation seems irreversible, and today it is no longer taken into account that both parts together contributed to the Enlightenment. Boldness in using one’s own arguments turned into arrogance. The cold rationalism of science and technology spread widely and transformed the world to the point where human existence itself was threatened. Art has been sadly helpless in the face of this.
Of course, this tension has had an impact on natural science as well. Many major thinkers eventually realized the inadequacy of the entrenched way of thinking. Despite the tremendous advances in particle physics or the analysis of homologous series in molecular genetics, the credo of the “fundamentalists” had already lost its exceptional appeal. It is no longer enough to discover basic laws and understand how the world works “in principle”. It is becoming more and more important to find out how these principles manifest themselves in reality. The most precise fundamental laws operate in the real world.”
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