National Science Week: How many Newtons are worth one Shakespeare?

THE INTELLECTUAL life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups . . . at one pole we have the literary intellectuals . . . at the other the scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding - C P Snow, 'The Two Cultures', Rede Lecture, 1959

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth - Rene Daumal, 'The Lie of Truth', 1938

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing-room full of dukes - W H Auden, 'The Poet and the City', 1962

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern of which I am a part . . . What is the pattern, or the meaning or the why? It does no harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it - Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics, 1971

Petite, attractive, intelligent WSF, 30, fond of music, theatre, books, travel, seeks warm, affectionate, fun-loving man to share life's pleasures with view to lasting relationship. Send photograph. Please no biochemists - personal column, New York Review of Books, c1980

Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money off them - Mark Twain, 1917

Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the

moon

he promises the stars he'll make us a new

universe if it comes to that

Allen Ginsberg, 'Poem Rocket', 1961

It may be said without exaggeration that science is civilisation - the application of the powers of nature to the arts of life - John Burroughs, naturalist, 1889

Art is I; Science is We - Claude Bernard, 1813-1878, French physiologist

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful - Philip K Dick, introduction to 'How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later', 1986

Full well I know 'tis difficult to chime

The laws of science with the rules of rhyme.

Solyman Brown, 'Dentologia: a Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth, and their Proper Remedies', 1833

I believe the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1801

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures - Georges Braque, Pensees sur l'art

In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement - Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 1917

I don't think that literature, good literature, has anything to fear from technology. The very opposite. The more technology, the more people will be interested in what the human mind can produce without the help of electronics - Isaac Bashevis Singer, interview in 'Writers at Work' (5th series), 1981

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis - Karl Kraus, 1912

The Science Museum and the 'Independent' are co-hosting 'Art and Science Don't Mix?', a forum organised as part of National Science Week, at the Science Museum on Friday. All seats are taken.