#Art inspired by physics how to#

Gradually, the baby accumulates a variety of images of bottles. Long before speech occurs, a baby develops an association between the image of a bottle and a feeling of satisfaction. Observe any infant as it masters its environment.

This capacity for abstraction and symbolic representation, Shlain argues, is hard-wired into the evolution of our cognitive development: In addition to illuminating, imitating, and interpreting reality … artists create a language of symbols for things for which there are yet to be words. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “There is no science without fancy and no art without facts.” There is considerable crossover in the technique used by both. The artist, on the other hand, often juxtaposes different features of reality and synthesizes them, so that upon completion, the whole work is greater than the sum of its parts. This process is principally one of reduction.

The Greek word, physis, means “nature.” … The physicist, like any scientist, sets out to break “nature” down into its component parts to analyze the relationship of those parts. Turning to the question of originality, Shlain argues that both art and physics are propelled by revolutionary insight - that transcendent clarity of vision that Rilke called a “conflagration of clear sight” - which reframes our understanding of the world:Īlthough the development of physics has always depended upon the incremental contributions of many original and dedicated workers, on a few occasions in history, one physicist has had an insight of such import that it led to a revision in his whole society’s concept of reality.Įmile Zola’s definition of art: “Nature as seen through a temperament,” invokes physics, which is likewise involved with nature. This is the common ground upon which they meet. While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist of the 1960s, declared, “Organized perception is what art is all about.” Sir Isaac Newton might have said as much for physics he, too, was concerned with organizing perceptions. Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality. Yet, despite what appear to be irreconcilable differences, there is one fundamental feature that solidly connects these disciplines. Traditionally, art has created illusions meant to elicit emotion physics has been an exact science that made sense… Art encompasses an imaginative realm of aesthetic qualities physics exists in a world of crisply circumscribed mathematical relationships between quantifiable properties. Of the many human disciplines, could there be two that seem more divergent? The artist employs image and metaphor the physicist uses number and equation. Shlain lays out the basic premise of the parallel between the two fields:Īrt and physics are a strange coupling. The need in my profession to shuttle back and forth constantly between these two complementary functions of the human psyche has served me well for this project. Left-brained logic, reason, and abstract thinking are the stepping-stones leading to the vast scientific literature’s arcane tenets. At the same time, our training is obviously scientific.

In the preface, Shlain - neither an artist nor a physicist himself - considers how his training as a surgeon lends him a unique perspective on the two fields and their cross-pollination:Ī surgeon is both an artist and a scientist… Surgeons rely heavily on their intuitive visual-spatial right-hemispheric mode.

#Art inspired by physics how to#

Clarke as they peered into the future of space exploration, “to start with romance and build to a reality.” “What would happen,” Marshall McLuhan wondered in his seminal 1964 treatise Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties?” More than a quarter century later, Leonard Shlain picked up the inquiry with added dimension in Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light ( public library) - an exploration of how “the inscrutability of modern art and the impenetrability of the new physics” intersect in a shared system of thinking about how the world works. “It’s part of the nature of man,” Ray Bradbury told Carl Sagan and Arthur C.