Sci&Tech History

The drawing and painting of people and animals, an activity of artists since primitive times, is clearly associated with symmetry and nature. Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who discovered that the planets move round the sun in ellipses, examined how a plane could completely filled with equal regular polygons. Music and symmetry also have a close affinity as seen in 24 Preludes and Fugues composed by Johann Sebastian Bach that can be explained using Pytagorean scale.

How drawing, painting, and music have pattern that also found in nature can help us to understand relation between our perception about beauty and nature. Relation between artificial object and nature can also be tracked from technology(techne=craft and logia=saying), a broad concept about materials tools and how it affects human to control and adapt to its environment. Hand phone as a tool to communicate, or car for travelling are few examples of how human extend their abilities to talk, listen, and speed by using tools outside their bodies. In prehistorical age, primitive tools such as Paleolithic flint spear and sword for hunting and fighting have been discovered. Tools that were developed in the early of human’s life are most dominated by tools to survive, one of human primitive instinct. Extended abilities by using tools also deliver human to power, control and creation.

In De natura deorum(45 B.C), Cicero conceived of a second nature that humans create by channelling the rivers to suit their needs, by sowing and fertilizing the soil of the plains and the mountains to bear fruit and wheat, and by planting trees shade their gardens and parks. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German poet and scientist, expressed the creative drive of his thought in his epic, Faust. Human creativity for Goethe became the mark of a divine life, as Rene Descartes said in his words, “Cogito ergo sum.” At the same time, Goethe found creative humans, such as Faust, guilty of the sin of pride, which, from a theological perspective, is the worst of the seven deadly sins.

Of course, we can always refuse to be Faust, but if only if we choose to it.

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