Science & Tech Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly slips a manifesto into a single, elegant hinge: “bring imagination to science and science to imagination.” The sentence is built like a bridge, not a slogan. It assumes two cultures drifting apart and treats the artist as the only figure licensed to traffic between them. In the mid-century world Connolly inhabited, science had become the dominant engine of authority - radar, antibiotics, the Bomb - while “imagination” risked being demoted to leisure activity, a soft supplement to hard knowledge. His provocation is to refuse that hierarchy.

The subtext is that both domains are incomplete on their own. Science without imagination becomes mere instrumentality: powerful, precise, and morally unmoored. Imagination without science turns into self-enclosed aestheticism: beautiful, maybe, but socially weightless. Connolly’s artist isn’t a decorator of facts or a dreamy mystic; he’s a translator who can metabolize new knowledge into forms people can live with.

Then comes the twist: “where they meet, in the myth.” Myth here isn’t a lie; it’s a narrative technology, the shared story that makes novel forces legible and emotionally actionable. Connolly is arguing that modernity still runs on myths - just updated ones: progress, apocalypse, the machine, the perfectible human. Artists don’t compete with scientists by producing rival explanations; they compete by shaping the meaning of explanations, by turning data into destiny or warning.

It’s also a quiet defense of culture work itself. In an age that rewards measurable outputs, Connolly insists the artist’s function is synthesis: not to escape reality, but to give reality its imaginative operating system.