A Public Lecture/Colloquium
4pm Thursday 09 Sept
1005 MH
Tea Reception 3:30 4009 MH

The Search for Reality in Western Art:
A Physicist's View of the History of Art and Its Relation to the History of Science

Lawrence S. Anderson-Huang
Department of Physics and Astronomy

Abstract:

Any history of Humankind's ideas of Natural Reality must attempt to understand how the human mind constructs `reality' from the senses and from logical inference. The fact that logical inference works at all is the Great Mystery. What ever our construction is,it is at best a map, a painting, of some aspects of Reality. Because we only make paintings, any one of us, from young children to old geezers, can with a brush experience the revelation of Rembrandt or with a rock experience the insight of Einstein. The Rembrandts will never run out of things to paint, and the Einsteins will never run out of symmetries to touch.

Painters and scientists (and musicians and poets) just use different brushes. The Greeks recognized these reflections of each other in the Muses. After a short discussion of how our senses (particularly vision) create reality, I will dwell on two transitional periods in art and science, the renaissance and the early 20th century. In the former period, both Muses shifted from `intuitive' representation to a recognition of `hidden' principles or formalities (perhaps it is better to say that the hidden formalities changed character from spiritual to natural). In the second period, both Muses shifted from an absolute (albeit perceptual) representation to an understanding that form is ultimately self-referential, abstract, relativist, and so by necessity contains contradictory elements. artists, scientists, and society as a whole are not finished with the second transition, and cannot yet even envision an outcome.