But first, a preface...
I love love love to read. Love it. And I missed it during the school year because my mind was so exhausted from mono, work, and school that all I had the energy to do was watch TV. (embarrassed sigh).
But now! It's summer. And I've been reading a lot, esp. when I was unemployed. I read a book called The Rapture of Canaan, which I loved, a Barbara Kingsolver called Pigs in Heaven which was entirely too slow. and then I read Water for Elephants, which sucked! I don't like to say anything particularly sucks... but really? The premise was interesting (Depression-era traveling circus) but that is where the book began and ended. The author isn't particularly skilled with words and her use of metaphor, trope, tone, and theme was minimal. Not a huge fan. It'll make a good movie, I'm sure. And by good I mean visually entertaining, with great costumes, and beautiful people... whala! box office smash.
Doesn't that just sound wonderful?
Anyway, it's about the complementary relationship between contemporary art and physics and their integral roles in shaping our society.
And it's blowing my mind. Seriously, if you consider yourself to be an active participant in our culture, a budding doctor, physicist, or scientists, an artist, creative thinker, writer, or modern visionary... you have to read this book. And I mean, have to.
Here is some of the memorable mind-blowing stuff he's sending my way. I'll break it up with some geographic minimalism... which I love... from Agnes Martin.
"When we reflect, ruminate, reminisce, muse and imagine, generally we revert to the visual mode. But in order to perform the brain's highest function, abstract thinking, we abandon the use of images and are able to carry on without resorting to them. It is with great precision that we call this type of thinking, "abstract." This is the majesty and the tyranny of language. To affix a name to something is the beginning of control over it"
"Revolutionary art and visionary physics attempt to speak about matters that do not yet have words. That is why their languages are so poorly understood by people outside their fields. Because they both speak of what is certainly to come, however, it is incumbent upon us to learn to understand them"
"In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant reinforced the views of Plato and Descartes in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant sadly declared that we can know the nature of things only by what filters through our senses and is processed by our mind, but we can never directly experience the Ding an sich: the thing in itself. By thus banishing us to the impenetrable tower of our thought, Kant asserted that we must all peer out at reality through the chinks of our senses. Our exasperating inability to know the world directly is one of the central existential dilemmas he perceived in the human condition. In his monumental work entitled The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer summed up this philosophical point of view in his trenchant opening sentence, "The world is my idea."
"Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves."12 According to the new physics, observer and observed are somehow connected, and the inner domain of subjective thought turns out to be intimately conjoined to the external sphere of objective facts."
"...the alphabet was civilization’s first abstract art form. As the actual shape of each letter became divorced from any connection to the image of the thing it might once have represented, the abstract quality of alphabets most likely subliminally reinforced the ability of those who used them to think abstractly."
"The nineteenth-century Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated, "It would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains.""
And good news people! Chapter 1,8, and 19... the good ones are available online!
www.artandphysics.com
Go there.
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