Week 9: Space + Art
As a result of its passive nature, space has been one of the most intriguing yet inconclusive subjects in the sciences, which can be observed but not experiment upon. The few answers that space has release about our origin and the universe has inspired fields such literature and the arts to speculate about the physical universe, its creation and our interaction with it. Novels such as Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot which presents universe’s known facts mixed with human philosophies in order to look into our future and movies such as Star Wars and Interstellar with topics such as spaceships, space colonization and space traveling are the result of such speculation in which the final product is a completely fictional and innovative solution to science’s first attempt to unveil outer space.
In this week’s lecture professor Vesna discussed an interesting interaction between Space, literature and art; which I understood as a chain of information that allows progress. This chain starts with the display of information and problems about space from the sciences which inspires artist and writers to fabricate inventions and scenarios to try to solve this problems with artwork and novels that explore unknown topics in a fictional way; these ideas form a chain of communication that comes back to the the sciences inspiring them to build real life machines and scenarios that allow space exploration to grow. I believe that the codependency between the sciences and the popular art and literature is necessary in order to enlarge our knowledge about space and therefore have a better understanding of where we come from and where we going. 
A great example of this interaction is the movie Interstellar. This movie is based in the theory of relativity and wormholes, in which pilot Cooper has to find a new planet to inhabit in order to save the earth’s population which is deteriorating. These theories were the input that inspired the movie but the movie as a whole was the response of the art, film and television back to science, giving scientists, engineers and mathematicians amazing ideas with respect to spaceships, time traveling and of course they created a physical idea of what the 5th dimension can look like. This response from popular culture and the artwork used to portray our massive universe inspired NASA into different project of space exploration would help to understand supermassive black holes and wormholes.
Sources:
1. M. Jay. Interstellar - Wormhole Scene 1080p HD. YouTube. 15 March 2015. Web.
2. NASA. NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Artist's Concept. Web. <https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/images/index.html>
3. Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot. YouTube, 24 March 2009. Web.
4. Unknown. Interstellar. Web.
5. Vesna, Victoria. 8 space pt1 YouTube. UC Online Program, 29 Jul. 2013. Web. 30 May. 2017.
I very much agree that art and science deeply influence each other in the area of space and art. Just as Snow mentioned in "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution", artists might understand something scientists do not and vice versa, which could lead to revolutionary discoveries. Because space is so vast and we are only one small speck in the universe, we heavily depend on art to understand what happens around us. I think you made an important point that is the core of the third culture.
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