Art and science reflect two very different ways that we are in the world.

To celebrate National Science Week, Scientist-turned-artist Steven Durbach will host a panel with both artists and scientists to discover common ground and shared goals between these two cultures.

Contemporary artists Jane Burton Taylor and Annelies Jahn and evolutionary biologist Russell Bonduriansky will discuss how the very different processes (art and science) come to know worlds and explore what the world looks like from these very different vantage points.

Australia is a country that punches above its weight in many domains. In science we have several Nobel Prize winners including recently Brian Schmidt (physics; 2011) and Elizabeth Blackburn (physiology or medicine; 2009). It also has great institutions of science like the CSIRO and the Australian Academy of Science. Separate to this, Australia is gifted with an illustrious art sector – of which the Sydney Opera is most emblematic. But do these two cultures talk to each other? Should they talk to each other? What can be gained by their interaction?

A society is incomplete when its different cultural elements are sperate from each other - when the head does not talk to the heart. There was a time when the arts and sciences were not separate cultures and the sciences was deeply informed by artistic approaches from the humanities like philosophy and literature. In the 1950s a famous essay by CP Snow lamented the gradual separation of science and the humanities – leading to the notion of science in its ivory tower and art only being for its own sake. But as the world heads to a more precarious place, it is clear that these two profound ways of knowing have to reach towards each other, so the head (our thinking) can find it’s heart (our feeling) and make us more whole.

Indigenous ideas speak of weaving knowledge together. Rather than forcing us to focus on the differences, maybe see how we can celebrate the differences and recognise a possibility of knowledge being more whole. Part of this process is bringing artists and scientists into conversation.