Bulletin of the American Physical Society Book

The full title of this book is Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light and it was written by a surgeon. I point out this last detail because I think non-professional works of high intellectual ambition are pretty rare. And well-executed ones are even rarer. I believe outsiders to an established discipline can often see patterns, make connections or hazard hypotheses that a trained professional either could not or would not do. Professional academics, scientists, artists and so forth who have spent years and years studying, practicing and executing their crafts can, and maybe should, possess a snob factor about this kind of book. I suppose I understand this stance, although I have a lot of musings about institutionalized disciplines and power structures of learning that I do not really want to get into right here. I offer, however, that I found Leonard Shlain's book about art and physics fascinating, well written and, insofar as I am equipped to say, well researched.


Shlain examines correspondences in the visual arts and physics, from the classical period through the present. I found this a wonderful project, especially as Shlain's ultimate hypothesis is not that the arts were influenced by developments in the sciences, but that the arts in strange and obscure ways seem to, over time, prefigure scientific discoveries. That is, Shlain does not propose causality, but correspondence. I find this especially interesting because it seems so unexplainable. It is precisely the kind of hypothesis I would never expect to find in an institutionally-derived work. Additionally, an institutionally-derived work would likely never purport to marry art and physics in the first place - the arts and sciences are so often viewed in opposition to each other and not as complementary visions of the same reality.


Shlain's final argument concerns an ultimate connectivity of cognitive states (and all time and matter) that occurs in a dimension we cannot perceive with our measly three-dimensional senses. Metaphorically, our individual-seeming, three-dimensional selves function like our cells, independently but nonetheless creating a unity of form and function, even of consciousness. In the case of cells the unity is us (or a cat, or a plant, etc.). In the case of us as cells...what is the unity we create? We simply cannot perceive this unity because we are locked in our three dimensionality. Some artists, as sensitive nodes, Shlain's argument runs, get a glimmer of this unity, translate it into their art and, thereby, provide effective visual metaphors for scientific discoveries that have not yet occured and that are exceedingly difficult to imagine as they precisely pertain to reality exterior to our three dimensions (he uses primarily Einstein's theories concerning gravity and how bizarrely matter behaves at the speed of light).


This may sound far out, but I would suggest you give this book a fighting chance. Shlain's basic argument, his evaluation of various artworks as demonstrating specific scientific findings - it all hinges on metaphor. And metaphor is an exceedingly powerful, non-causal means of connectivity. The roots of metaphor grow out of language, which in turn is likely the root out of which grows our very cognition. Julian Jaynes has argued that consciousness itself is a metaphorical space we have created linguistically. Additionally, many of the scientific findings of the 20th century that pertain to light, physics and the nature of reality are only comprehensible to our three-dimensional minds via metaphor. There seems to be something more accurate about the correspondences in metaphorical relationships than about the causal relationships between events that we purport to live by. As Hayden White has observed, causality is a construction imposed on events through our human need to narrativize - causality and narrative do not inhere in events themselves, and only seem to do so when we are bounded by the third dimension and cannot perceive time as a unity.


The short of the long is that Shlain probably made a few mistakes here and there that an artist writing about art, a physicist writing about physics, and a historian writing about the history of either, would not have made. But neither would the artist, the physicist or the historian likely have blended these seemingly disjointed disciplines into one comprehensive vision of the reality in which we find ourselves.