Art and Science

Last week I saw a story about a Hubble image being compared to the van Gogh painting "The Starry Night." I couldn't help but think about a book I read a few years ago called Art & Physics by Leonard Shlain which begins:

Art and physics are a strange coupling. Of the many human disciplines, could there be two that seem more divergent? The artist employs image and metaphor; the physicist uses number and equation. Art encompasses an imaginative realm of aesthetic qualities; physics exists in a world of crisply circumscribed mathematical relationships between quantifiable properties.