Engineering produces stunningly beautiful objects – the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, 1950s Ferraris, the Boeing 787, and many iconic products designed by Apple under Steve Jobs.
Like artists, engineers leave an aesthetic trail of ideas bifurcating and evolving through rough sketches, complex drawings, models, and mockups. Today we have photo-realistic computer renderings, virtual reality images, and 3D printed working prototypes.
We also see in scientific and engineering publications stunning images of objects and natural phenomena generated by an array of ever more powerful and deep probing scientific instruments, such as electron microscopes, X-rays, and so on. Many of these images are exquisitely beautiful and even artistic looking. In my earlier days doing fluid experiments with chaotic flows, I, along with others, produced myriad spectacularly artistic-looking images – interesting, beautiful, even inspirational images. But is any of this art? No.
