The University of Idaho Argonaut

Professors Dan Bukvich and Tom Bitterwolf led “Dimensions of Creativity,” an unstructured public conversation on the creative process in the Idaho Commons on Thursday.
The discussion revealed the surprising commonalities between progression in the fields of science and humanities.
“It’s fun just to hang out with really smart people,” Bukvich said. “There’s nothing like going to a conversation and feeling way, totally out of your element. I love it.”

Nearly 100 students and faculty attended the one-hour discussion.
Those who participated in the dialogue steered the conversation through the areas of music theory, wavelength physics, quantum mechanics and physiology.

Some voiced opinions on the creative opportunities of University of Idaho students. The professors said they had never hosted anything like this before.
Bitterwolf is a professor of chemistry and currently oversees a campus research group focusing on inorganic compounds.

Bukvich is a composer and has been teaching music at UI since 1978, specializing in percussion. He also teaches freshman theory and ear training and conducts the university jazz choirs.
Thursday’s presentation was designed to be an open forum between the professors and anyone attending, stimulated by a few specific examples.

“I think students don’t usually have the opportunity to see the real fun of being an academic,” Bitterwolf said, “to come up to someone with a totally different viewpoint than you and find commonalities.”
The idea for “Dimensions of Creativity” stemmed from the interdisciplinary work relationship between the two men.
Bitterwolf said that their “seemingly separate fields intersect” and they “have more in common than they appear to at first glance.”

“Tom did a lecture for one of my music classes, a while back, where he discussed chemical terms that had their musical counterpoints,” Bukvich said.
The lecture explained how the surface of a tympani has a set of harmonics that relate to how scientists understand the wave nature of an atom.

“In science, we use metaphor to help people understand what you can’t actually see. Music classes are the same way,” Bitterwolf said. “They know the words fundamental and harmonic, and I can use something as simple as a jump rope to demonstrate the wave nature behind that.
It’s a wonderful hook for me to be able to explain something like that to them.”
Bitterwolf and Bukvich have continuously looked for opportunities to help each other illustrate principles of both art and science to their students.

“A scientist will see that musicians approach composing with the same scientific experimental methods that they use,” Bukvich said. “Musicians will see their process in science. It’s another way to look at something.”
Inspiration to host an open discussion on their observations also stemmed from their mutual familiarity with the 1959 book “The Two Cultures,” by British scientist and novelist, C.P. Snow.

Snow’s book expressed his concern about professionalized sciences in the 1930s and that prior to that time sciences and humanities were nearly synonymous, receiving contributions from many of the same people.
“There’s a tendency, now, to think that they can’t even talk to each other,” Bitterwolf said. “We can show that’s not true. There’s a lively and refreshing conversation between the two.”