Hi Bill.
My name’s Theo.
I’m 13 years old and I’m a huge fan of
your work.
I want to know if you think art is important.
And if art is important is it as important
as the sciences?
Thanks.
Theo.
Yeah I can see his name.
That was helpful.
Yeah okay, here we go.
Theo.
Theo you’ve got to have art.
We have to have art.
We have to have science.
I will claim that science is the best idea
humans have ever had but, I mean, I’m a
science educator.
You would expect that from me.
But I listen to music all day.
I make up lyrics for songs all day.
When I make a thing which I like to do all
the time, a tinkerer, I like the thing to
look good.
And I have done standup comedy telling jokes
in an effort to get people to think about
us, ourselves, our relationships to each other,
our society.
These to me are all forms of art that I participate
in.
I shudder to think what my world would be
like without other artists contributing which
would not be nearly as good.
You have to have both.
But what I encourage everybody is you don’t
want to have one to the exclusion of the other.
You want to have both – science and art.
However, science has affected our society
dramatically.
What’s the most significant invention ever?
It might be a sewer.
Without sewers we would just not have as good
a life as we have right now in the developed
world.
And that’s based on science.
Roads, cars, this computer, this video interaction
that we’re having.
That’s all enabled by science.
But you want the background to look good.
You want my tie to look good.
Whoever made my tie was an artist and I’m
glad that he or she was out there doing this
piece of art.
So you’ve got to have both man.
Don’t take one or the other.
And don’t use it as an excuse not to learn
algebra.
