Science and art have been viewed by many as two separate, or even opposite, entities: Science is often associated with highly successful academic individuals, daunting terminologies, tidious and laborious labworks, objective or simply those who devote their entire life to research; on the other hand, art is thought to be intuitive, innate, determined by talents, subjective, and low-paid jobs (musicians for example, although this is considered a bad one and is not even true at all). These stereotypes are nonetheless could not be any further than the truth. In fact, science and art are not even opposite; they are only different aspects to what a person may pursue in their career. How I view and break the assumptions is that science contains some kind of art domain, and similarly, there are some kind of science domain in art.
If you ask any Asian parent (although this is also highly stereotypical, and I am sorry for that) what science is involed or what scientists do, there is a high chance that they will say:
"Probably they work in a lab, mixing chemicals or work with lasers. If they are mathematicians then what else do they need apart from pen and paper..."
"They studied either math, physics, chemistry or biology, or any combination of those."
That's the bitter truth. I don't know very well how people from other parts of the world would respond to these questions, though I suspect the answers would be similar. This reflects the stereotypes I mentioned just above: laboratory works, boring, repetitive, study in certain fields. Moreover, if I asked the same people what research is involved, they would answered basically the same thing. That means the research world, in the eyes of common public, is associated with math, physics, chemistry, biology, and if lucky, some may say medicine and pharmacy (Many people don't think health science is an actual science).
In actuality, science can be anything related to the systematic and structure studies of the natural world. Because the aforementioned fields demonstrate the clearest evidence for this kind of relationship (between the observative work and the natural world), it is expected that many people would believe those are the only ones in science. In addition, these fields are far more popular (or well-known) due to its world-changing implications; for instance, Tesla for alternated currents, Newton for gravitaional force, Gallileo for his heliocentric model, etc. Now let's name some world-changing invention/theory in other fields, say zoology or entomology. Very hard, right (?), and I can't even name more than five. It's because of this favored position of some highly-relevant fields that makes other field seemingly unimportant.
The fact is, as I said, anything can be science if it involves the systematic observation of the natural world, be it actual nature (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, health, math, etc) or other kinds of nature (socialogy, psychology, philosophy, etc). And for any science subject, research can be done to widen the body of knowledge of that particular subject, or to build bridge to connect multiple subjects togeher (multi-, inter- and transprofessional research).
A fundamental question to ask would be how I consider art to be. A simplified version of art might be related to the creativity of the mind, and ways to express the creativity on a communicable medium (it would be cool if we could read people's ideas while maintaining confidentiality). Because human's creativity resides in the mind, it would be at least somewhat subjective, and would be hard/impossible to teach conventionally. Even the most objective things are preceived through our senses, and therefore subjective to subjectivity. Science is not an exception. We observe the world by our senses, however, only this time aided with an extensive, systematic, structured, replicable, (predictable) and constructible apparatus, or we say methodology of research. No matter how objective we try to be, we cannot be 100% objective, believe it or not. That being said, indeed there might be some things that are more objective than others, say a physical length of 1 meter is obviously more objective than your feelings about the Twilight saga, and we use the most objective things as our building block for science research.
During my time as a research intern with Dr Kayley Lyons, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a research project on (meta)cognition in pharmacy education settings. There I was actively involved in analyzing qualitatively the data, basically finding and assigning themes appropriately for every action. At first, I thought "How hard could it be? Just like when you choose between oranges, apples and grapes, which is quite obvious". I could not be more wrong in my life. The whole process was iterative, dynamic, and might even be unpredictable. You thought you solved the problem, but it turned out to have another way to do the same thing (?) The point is, what I gradually realized from the internship is that a person should have the intuition, the feels for the data before even working with it. That's why in the majority of qualitative research, authors "immersed themselves" in the data pool, "read through with little engagement to familiarize themselves with the type of data they are working with". Only when the connection between the researcher and the data is established, which I consider an art, one may wish to continue analyzing the data.
That is only one minor example when there is something mystical, undefined, non-analytical of art in the midst of the clear, well-defined, analytical world of science. To be even more relatable, I shall give some simpler examples. Scientific writing is an art; gaining experience is an art; working through boring times is an art; submitting an article and responding to peer-review feedback is an art; connecting with peers and collaborators is an art; public speaking to present your results is an art. Each example closely support the statement that "art is subjective, is usually unteachable, and is a way to express one's creativity in a subject". There will always be a bit of art in science, and collectively, the art can elevate the science.
Back to the other end of the spectrum (although there is no spectrum at all), many may think that art would be music, scupting, painting, or anything that are not science. Art and science are the two circles of a Venn's diagram that barely overlap. Actually, science would be irrelevant and alien to art since the whole concept of art is "to be spontaneous and subjective".
I play the classical guitar myself, so I studied a weebit of music theory (I was not trained classically, ironically, and I am literally 99% self-taught). While it is true that music is very inspiration-driven, there are also "rules" we can apply to make good new music, and "rules" we can use to scrutinize existing music. As any science subject, a musical piece can be opened up, examined systematically in various angles: musically, historically, ethnologically, socially, physically, psychologically, etc. A line of melody can result in endless discussion of how and why certain music is supposed to sound that way. Unfortunately, unlike science, it is hard to prove a musical work to be true or untrue, authentic or unauthentic. We can only go as far as what is considered good or bad, significant or mediocre, but that's good enough for me. I would be so unsettled if there is one "true music" in this universe.
That's only in the field of music. Studying anatomy in painting and scupting is science; analyzing chord pregression is science; examining forged artworks is science; tracking Bach's travelling in Europe is science; finding out what's the deal between Barrios and Segovia is science; and most importantly, psychology is science. There is a brief science of the human mind in every Pollock's painting, and there is an enormous amount of science in Bach's fugal works.
Let us remember that no matter what we are studying or pursuing, we are all artists, and lest us forget the scientist in all artists. We must not let the works done by so many underrated researchers in underrated fields undiscovered and be vain. We have undermined enough.