I reckon (and as a not-Nobel-laureate I may, Tim assures me, hypothesise with relative impunity) that artists have always embraced science - it's science that gives us new pigments, new techniques and new media, science improves our tools, it widens our audience and plays its part in enabling professional specialisation in societies.
What Tim actually appears to be saying is not that anybody should embrace anything, but that artists should do a lot less embracing of woo (and tattoos and hair dye, apparantly, which seems uncalled for - I manage quite well without either, and both are now so mainstream that I'd be surprised if a significant number of scientists didn't have one and/or use the other).
What he could have more productively said, given that his audience was (largely) scientists and not (principally) artists, is that scientists could profit from embracing art. Perhaps not directly in their field, although I'd hope that imagination and creativity would benefit any sort of exploration and discovery, but certainly in the way science is communicated to the wider world. Given that this was the foreword to a collection of science writing, he might have started with his final paragraphs and run with that point - that art is as essential to science as science is to art. Instead he spends a lot of time apparantly deriding artists - even when he admits to building a massive strawman, it turns out he's not admitting to a massively misleading portrayal of the artists view of scientists, he's just burning it down to make way for a new one, in which no scientists are "cold, boring and amoral". But some scientists are, just as some artists are air-headed woos with pink hair and tattoos.
Yes, there is (as he says) a popular perception that the two fields are irreconcilably opposed. Academia keeps them well apart (though I got a BSc partly by burning giant origami swans for an elective module from the art faculty - it did not go down well with the science faculty). Though there are undeniably talented artists here, there's also ample evidence of not only ignorance of art, but also of uncaring ignorance - even with google to hand, Duchamp's work is credited to Warhol (for example)...an equivalent of claiming Einstein discovered gravity.
Again, if both sides need to stop being sides, and you have the opportunity to speak to one 'side', the message would be more convincing if it didn't focus so much on blaming the other side.
