Paris, August 19, 1839. François Arago reads the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process into the joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Within weeks the satirical press is mocking photographers as mechanics and copyists. Twenty years later, Charles Baudelaire writes the canonical hostile statement: photography belongs in the museum of records, not the gallery of art. The painters of 1839 were wrong. They were also partly right. The Scientific Aesthetic begins with that double judgment and works through its consequences.

At the heart of the book is a single test that cuts through both science and art and gives us a more honest classification of who has done what. The test asks whether a particular act brought into existence something that did not exist before, either by revealing a truth that was operating before any consciousness named it, or by making a thing or method that no consciousness had assembled before. Acts that pass the test are originating. Acts that apply established methods to new instances are craft. The test runs orthogonally to the conventional border between science and art. It produces a category of originators that contains both scientists and artists, and a category of craftsmen that contains both engineers and studio photographers.