Art & Physics: Parallel Visions In Space, Time, and Light.

Leonard Shlain

The thesis of this PowerPoint
presentation based on the nationally best
selling book of the same name proposes
that the visionary artist anticipated
through the use of image and metaphor
many of the ideas of modern physics
before the revolutionary physicist
expressed them in equations and
formulae. An overview of the links
between art and physics begins with
their connections in Classical Greece
and continues right up through the art of
the present. Although the book
primarily focuses on the visual arts, Dr.
Shlain also noted the same links between
music and literature and discoveries in
physics. There are chapters covering
these subjects.

Dr. Shlain demonstrates how the
perspective invented in Western art in
the renaissance corresponds to important
principles of physics discovered by
Newton. Impressionists in the 19
th

century such as Manet, Monet, and
Czannes created images that anticipated
the breakthroughs in physics made by
Einstein. Dr. Shlain juxtaposes images
of Picasso and Baroque and reveals how
similar they are to the ideas expressed by
Einstein in his many thought
experiments.

Moving on to Futurism, the Italian artists
under the leadership of Marinetti created
many images that were visual
expressions of The Special Theory of
Relativitys concepts of time.
Duchamps Nude Descending a
Staircase is used by Shlain to
demonstrate how the artist managed to
create images of ideas in physics for
which there was not yet words.
Surrealism, as expressed by Dali,
Magritte, and Escher contain important
images to help the rest of us understand
the scientific paradigm shifts that
occurred in the new fields of quantum
and relativity.



Nude Descending a Staircase
Oil on Canvas, 1912
Philadelphia Museum of Art


Ren Magritte
Belgian,1898 1967
Castle in the Pyrenees,1959


The subject of color as a value in
Western art will be compared to the
ideas of Einstein concerning light. Color
is light of variable wavelengths. Fauvist
artists at the turn of century recognized
the value of pure color elevating it to the
highest throne in art about the same time
Einstein realized that light, which is
color, is the quintessence of the universe.

Sculpture, the art form of gravity, is
covered in four chapters because among
the great discoveries of modern physics
was the Einsteins revelation that gravity
was not a force but rather an alteration in
the fabric of spacetime. Modern
sculptors found inventive ways to
express the physicists relationships in
their art.

The art of the East, children and natives
differ significantly from the norms
developed in the West. Caparisons
between the art of China, Japan, and
Korea are placed alongside western
aesthetic values. Similar different
outlooks among children and primitive
cultures concerning their perceptions of
space, time and light proved in the
twentieth century to be prescient in light
of relativitys and quantum discoveries.

The last five chapters concern human
consciousness and how the brain is
structured. Dr. Shlain uses the
differential functions of the two
hemispheres as a template to explain the
differences between art and science.
The book ends with a discussion of the
only individual in all of human history to
successfully meld the twin fields of art
and science Leonardo da Vinci. Shlain
concludes that art and physics are both
languages. One uses image and
metaphor and the other uses number and
equations, but the visionaries of both are
involved in trying to understand the
nature of reality. It behooves all of us to
try to better integrate our two
hemispheres to become more creative
and fulfilled. One place to start is to
understand art in terms of physics and
physics in terms of art. The creations of
twentieth century artists will then begin
to be seen as expressions of
inexpressible ideas in physics and we
will gain a new sense of awe for the
beauty of the concepts contained within
the new science.