". . . My curiosity has been sparked and this is good since I happen to believe that curiosity is the source of creativity."

This post is by Diego Carrasco Schoch, a faculty member in the School of Dance at the UNC School of the Arts and an ARTStem participant.

It is healthy to occasionally be nudged and prodded so that our perceptions, biases, and habits shift a little. So it was for me as a result of my attendance at the recent ARTStem summer seminar. As a result of four days of discourse regarding art, science, and curriculum, there has been a distinct shift in my everyday outlook. This shift has manifested in such a way that I find myself in a period of greater awareness and mindfulness about scientific ideas that unexpectedly pop up in my life. Have these ideas been popping up all along and I just haven’t been noticing them? I don’t know, but I’m fairly certain that I have encountered more scientific ideas in the past two weeks than I’m use to encountering in six months.

For example, I was recently at the house of a friend’s parents and I caught sight of a book called “50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know” on the shelf and I thought to myself, “Hmm, I should get my hands on a copy of that and take a look.” A day later at another friend’s house I see a book entitled “50 Physics Ideas You Really Need To Know.” Apparently it’s a series. And a popular one at that.

Needless to say, much to the consternation of my friend, I had my nose in the physics book excitedly telling my (unexcited) friend that I just saw a documentary about this guy and “…here he is, right here—Hugh Everett! He was a physics prodigy and used some really complicated math to postulate parallel universes and it flew in the face of these Copenhagen guys and the status quo and nobody really took him seriously until a whole lot later in his life just before he died. And all this was seen from the perspective of his musician son who never really understood science and math. It was really cool!”

I borrowed the book for a night.

I learned that the difference between weight and mass is that weight is the measure of force (gravity) that pulls mass down; mass measures the number of atoms in a body. This was interesting because I talk about the body’s mass all the time in my classes. And, luckily, somewhat correctly. Oh, and Einstein essentially proved energy and mass are interchangeable. But the first thing that actually really resonated with me was literally on page 4, Chapter 1, 3rd paragraph: “… Like graph paper, Newton’s space contained an engraved set of coordinates and he mapped all motions with respect to that grid.”

Geez, thought I, that’s pretty much what I do as choreographer or even as a dancer improvising – I map out motions (and shapes and gestures) and engrave my body onto that particular space at that moment. Reading on, I discover that: “… [Ernst] Mach, however, disagreed, arguing instead that motion was only meaningful if measured with respect to another object, not the grid.”

Wow. Some might say, as the late Merce Cunningham did, that meaning in dance is created by having two or more bodies in space together.

My point is that I am noticing things and taking an interest in things I may not have previously noticed. My curiosity has been sparked and this is good since I happen to believe that curiosity is the source of creativity. (I have other things to say about the notion of creativity, but that’s for another day.) My awareness of the world has shifted slightly and this also is good, since I believe that without these regularly occurring occasional shifts, my thinking would become intransigent and stagnate. What this may produce only time will tell.

—Diego Carrasco Schoch