Poles apart?

 Science and literature are supposed to be poles apart. Are they indeed? In my opinion, there are any number of similarities between the two. So, even if they are two different cultures, to quote the famous C.P.Snow analogy, they are vastly similar, too.

Why do I say so? First and foremost, both need vast imagination and deep creativity. To think of a new paradigm in science, a scientist has to be both creative and imaginative so much so that the new scientific  and/or technological solutions often appear as images, and in dreams.

Similarly, literature, too, has its own logic and its own discipline, however much may it be mystified as "divine frenzy". So much is the method in this supposed madness that critics can find ever newer patterns and paradigms in each individual text and/or in the oeuvre by an author, or in a genre, and so on.

Want the currently popular, best ever example of the deep connection between the two? Remember the robots and the AI. Both have depended on vast imagination, deep insights, and a disciplined and logical  intellectual rigour for their very emergence and  their existence!

And yet robotics and the AI of every possible latest design prove irrefutably that science and literature  are poles apart. Why? Well, science, as robotics and the AI prove, is absolutely amoral, while literature is deeply ethical. 

Similarly, science and technology, especially, are use-, nay, even user-centred. In other words, their fortune is essentially utilitarian. Literature, on the contrary, is actually 'useless'. Why, these days nobody reads deeply. People read just self-help books, even these are preferred  to be 'heard', as ten-minute audio summaries! Who cares if the summaries are imprecise, and the language is incorrect? Online authors are a-plenty!

Well, let me end this small little piece with an image from the Roman mythology. In my opinion, the relationship between the two is like the two-faced Roman god, Janus who has two faces, both looking in different directions, one backward and the other forward. Yet the brain that drives them and the mind that underlies them is the same, right? 

Pratima@ If they are indeed poles apart, for a full life, both these poles are as much needed as the earth depends both on the South and the North poles for the diurnal rotations!