Review: "Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, & Light

In 1991, San Francisco Chronicle had a real book review section. They sent me Leonard Shlain's first book. I didn't know him then, but I met him a few years later and who wouldn't love me after this review of his first book in his home town paper? We learned that we lived only a few miles apart, so we walked and talked in the hills near our homes. He was a wild and wonderful thinker and talker; in the days before PowerPoint he made his arguments with scores of carefully chosen slides. A veteran of the Six Day War and a pioneer in laproscopic surgery. Of course I miss him. While he was still alive, I independently met his daughter, Tiffany Shlain, a filmmaker who was also the founder of the Webbies. Her great innovation was limiting acceptance speeches to five words each. Leonard, knowing that he was dying of brain cancer, appeared as a projection at his own memorial, filmed by his daughter. He wore a white tuxedo with a heavenly background of clouds and sky and addressed the audience from beyond the grave. . The sequence also appeared in her film Connected: An Autobiography, which started out to be (and still is) about the consequences of our social-media-hyper-connected lives.

Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, & Light

By Leonard Shlain

William Morrow & Company, October 1991.

Review by Howard Rheingold. 1991.

Scientists think about the world in new ways. The equations or  experiments that express scientific thoughts can trigger cultural  revolutions, change nature itself. Artists see and hear the world in new  ways, and the way they convey their transformed perceptions in grace  notes or brush strokes can help others experience a similar re-ordering  of the senses. Science helps us understand how the world works. Art  helps us interpret what reality means.

So goes the common wisdom.

But what if turns out that the scientists couldn't do what they do  unless the artists first helped them to reperceive the universe? Leonard  Shlain, author of Art & Physics  makes a bold and persuasive  case that art has always been a powerful if unacknowledged driving  force behind science, rather than a kind of sideline commentary. At the  conclusion of Art and Physics, the author ties his hypotheses  together with a new theory about why humans have, in effect, two  different brains. Shlain juxtaposes examples from the history of art  with episodes from the history of science and a pattern seems to emerge  strongly: the visionary breakthroughs of specific artists prepared  everybody, including scientists, for the changes in thinking that  scientists would introduce: "The artist, with little or no awareness of  what is going on in the field of physics, manages to conjure up images  and metaphors that are strikingly appropriate when superimposed upon the  conceptual framework of the physicist's later revisions of our ideas  about physical reality."

Throughout history, the way artists think about light, space, and time  have set up a new mind set that led to the kinds of questions that led  to scientific paradigm-shifts.

Art & Physics contrasts and compares Leonardo's theories with  Newtonian mechanics, points out the parallels between Impressionism and  quantum physics, and attempts to explain Monet's aesthetic mission and  Einstein's intellectual framework in ways non-experts can understand.  Much of the book is about European painting, with chapters devoted to  tracing the same connections through sculpture, music, drama, and  literature.

This is not new territory. Cultural historians such as O.B. Hardison and shelves full of French theorists have pointed out that upheavals in  art history over the past 500 years have always been intertwined with  other cultural upheavals, particularly those caused by science and  technology. It is one thing, however, to point out an intriguing but  inconsequential relationship between artistic and scientific evolution,  and quite another thing to insist that the process of art is integral to  the progress of science, and furthermore that both ways of seeing the  world are not only complementary but hardwired into human brains.

Shlain presents his evidence that artists have created symbolic  languages that have changed history and inspired scientists to create  new symbolic frameworks such as physics: "In the case of the visual  arts, in addition to illuminating, imitating, and interpreting reality, a  few artists create a language of symbols for things for which there are  yet to be words. Just as Sigmund Freud in his Civilization and Its  Discontents compared the progress of a civilization's entire people to  the development of a single individual, I propose that the radical  innovations of art embody the preverbal stages of new concepts that will  eventually change a civilization...."

According to Shlain's hypothesis, the introduction of perspective into  Western art by Giotto and Alberti prefigured the work of Galileo, and  Leonardo DaVinci laid the groundwork for Newton. Manet's experiments  with space and Monet's experiments with time were the initiation of a  way of thinking that led to Einstein's theorems of spacetime. At the end  of the book, Dr. Shlain directs attention to the idea that there is  really no such thing as a primacy of art or physics, but both  disciplines, each way of apprehending the world we experience, is part  of a complementary pair. "Single Vision and Newton's Sleep," was the  feared imbalance that William Blake bleakly prophesied at the dawn of  the Industrial revolution. Shlain makes a rational case for the value of  the irrational, intuitive, affective parts of our own nature, and the worldviews that grow with them.

Ironically, those artistic radicals whose innovations seem to have  inspired scientific breakthroughs were scorned by their contemporaries.  Enumerating six characteristics of the special theory of relativity that  challenged the foundations of common sense, Shlain claims: "As radical  as all these principals were, artists anticipated each and every one  without any knowledge of this theory of science. With sibylline  accuracy, revolutionary artists incorporated all these new perceptions  of reality into the picture plane of their art. In my interpretation of  art history, it was these very innovations that brought down upon their  heads the scorn and ridicule of the public and critics alike, who could  not know that they had been privileged to be the first to glimpse the  shape of the future."

Is the world as we see it, or as we think it is? This issue was the crux  of a two thousand year old competition of ideas. Physics won.  Philosophers and artists havenÕt gone away since Newton swept the field,  but most people today agree that a cure for cancer or a doomsday weapon  is more significant than a symphony or a sculpture. There's a black  irony at the heart of physics' victory, and we all know what it is: new  ways to think about the world have proven to be dangerous, in the  absence of new ways to perceive. Science has provided an overabundance  of new ways of thinking. More than ever we all need to learn new ways to  see, feel, and find meaning.

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