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Summary: Art and Physics: Parallel visions in Space, Time and Light
Review: A good book to read before GEB
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Summary: Great book in both content and subject(s).
Review: After reading Art & Physics, I discovered I knew more about physics than about art - very much a surprise for a liberal arts major. While the physics presented by Dr. Shlain built upon the physics I learned in college, I discovered new ways of looking at and interpreting artists' works. This, I believe, is the beauty of Dr. Shlain's work. By pointing out the connections between two seemingly unrelated fields, he provides the opportunity to apprehend and utilize ideas in ways I, and I think many others, had not previously considered. His delineation of the developments in the history of art, and particularly painting, has caused me to review ideas I had previously taken as "givens" - always a healthy exercise. You don't have to be a scientist or an artist to appreciate Art & Physics. Dr. Shlain's theories and his writing make the journey at least as enjoyable as the destination.
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Summary: Artists are always the first to know!
Review: After studying quantum physics for nearly twenty years and still being relatively clueless as to what it is all about, Schlain has helped me grasp, at least fundamentally some of the basic concepts. Showing parallels between artistic, philosophical and scientific developments, the author convincingly shows how artists were the first to sense the coming changes and would foreshadow it in their work. Schlain, a surgeon by profession, uses his scholarly acumen to dissect such troublesome cataracts/tumors as Newton, Descartes and others responsible for setting in motion a delusional mechanistic mindset still stubbornly with us, i.e., that we are isolated, individual egos separate from everything else around us. We only need to look at the interrelations between art and physics to help break free of the gravity of this consensual hallucination once and for all. Jaye Beldo: Netnous@Aol.Com
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Summary: Artists are always the first to know!
Review: After studying quantum physics for nearly twenty years and still being relatively clueless as to what it is all about, Schlain has helped me grasp, at least fundamentally some of the basic concepts. Showing parallels between artistic, philosophical and scientific developments, the author convincingly shows how artists were the first to sense the coming changes and would foreshadow it in their work. Schlain, a surgeon by profession, uses his scholarly acumen to dissect such troublesome cataracts/tumors as Newton, Descartes and others responsible for setting in motion a delusional mechanistic mindset still stubbornly with us, i.e., that we are isolated, individual egos separate from everything else around us. We only need to look at the interrelations between art and physics to help break free of the gravity of this consensual hallucination once and for all. Jaye Beldo: Netnous@Aol.Com
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Summary: Two-way Consciousness
Review: Art & Physics is a brilliant survey,not just of the seminal relationship between art and physics, but a study of human consciousness in its dual right-left brain dichotomy, and a study of how the combination produces unity. This is an astonishing work---crystal clear physics and a whole new concept of the place of art in our lives.
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Summary: Physics Complements Art
Review: Art and Physics intrigues from the beginning when the three concepts of space, time and light are introduced - - obviously subjects basic to both art and physics. The common thread the author has identified in these disciplines may not be apparent to a reader devoted to one or the other. A humane observer discovers the commonality. He further breaks out beyond the concepts of cause and effect, beyond gravitational pull, beyond linear time/mind, beyond all the dualistic traps that still retain most of our mundane "realities." His insight into the message of artistic imagery is bold and reflective. C. G. Jung would have applauded this book for its synthesis of image and empiricism. Seeing what Monet did to dissolve time, what Manet did to free space, what Pollock did to crack open the void where inspiration enters - - these are lasting new views of the power and message of artistic image. Science has been our myth of meaning. From Plato to Euclid to Einstein and Bohr, the pull of discovery becomes clearly singular - - the "uni" in universe. The timeliness of Dr. Shlain's premise lies in the urgent search for balance by anyone skewed in the conflict of apparent opposites. It is restorative to read the examples of holistic, all-at-once knowing which is the healing balm for Western culture as our old dominant fades. The book reminds us of the dimension and direction to which we are called. How sensible to be oneself in the fullest as Leonardo was Leonardo and Dr. Shlain is Dr. Shlain. It is encouraging to see that this book is assigned in high schools and colleges where young minds will, no doubt, be quick to grasp its profound implication.
Rating:
Summary: Physics Complements Art
Review: Art and Physics intrigues from the beginning when the three concepts of space, time and light are introduced - - obviously subjects basic to both art and physics. The common thread the author has identified in these disciplines may not be apparent to a reader devoted to one or the other. A humane observer discovers the commonality. He further breaks out beyond the concepts of cause and effect, beyond gravitational pull, beyond linear time/mind, beyond all the dualistic traps that still retain most of our mundane "realities." His insight into the message of artistic imagery is bold and reflective. C. G. Jung would have applauded this book for its synthesis of image and empiricism. Seeing what Monet did to dissolve time, what Manet did to free space, what Pollock did to crack open the void where inspiration enters - - these are lasting new views of the power and message of artistic image. Science has been our myth of meaning. From Plato to Euclid to Einstein and Bohr, the pull of discovery becomes clearly singular - - the "uni" in universe. The timeliness of Dr. Shlain's premise lies in the urgent search for balance by anyone skewed in the conflict of apparent opposites. It is restorative to read the examples of holistic, all-at-once knowing which is the healing balm for Western culture as our old dominant fades. The book reminds us of the dimension and direction to which we are called. How sensible to be oneself in the fullest as Leonardo was Leonardo and Dr. Shlain is Dr. Shlain. It is encouraging to see that this book is assigned in high schools and colleges where young minds will, no doubt, be quick to grasp its profound implication.
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Summary: Good historical review if you ignore the flaws
Review: Having a good background in physics and not so in the arts I found the commentary on the artwork quite interesting without getting bogged down in nebulous descriptions of things. The physics is sometimes flawed and I found the whole attempt to connect art and science interesting but ultimately like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The book really doesn't address why this connection exists. Rather he focuses on how his interpretation of what an artist was doing preceded what his interpretation of what a scientific principle was illustrating. My friends and I saw just as many things that weren't similar. Ignore that and just enjoy the art history
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Summary: Not only the physics is wrong!
Review: I am a physicist, but the most glaring errors I found in this book (which I have been unable to bring myself to finish) are in the history of philosophy and religion. Mr. Shlain's conception of philosophy seems to go no deeper than what one could glean from a perusal of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Another reviewer observed that his scope is broad while his knowledge is shallow, but none seems to have mentioned this particular weakness. An example: he opens the third chapter by stating catgorically that "Early" Christianity (which, in his inaccurate accounting, runs from AD 400 to AD 1250) dismissed logic as irrelevant. And while the "Dark Ages" did have a relative dearth of philosophers (caused chiefly by widespread death and the destruction of civilization), an era that produced the likes of Boethius and Abelard, and ended with Aquinas, can scarcely be called devoid of interest in logic! These examples could be multiplied, but I will content myself with one more (from the same area of the book, because it's where I happen to be looking): his statements on the history of literacy are also woefully lacking. He repeatedly describes literacy as something "lost" to Europe during the Dark Ages, as if the Goths, the Vandals, and the Roman mob were really products of some sort of early Sorbonne until the icy hand of Christian ignorance descended, when the fact of the matter is that the decline and decadence of late Rome had accelerated the loss of the (*always* rare) literate "public" well before the advance of Christianity and certainly before the Dark Ages set in. It is also certainly true that most of the peoples of Europe had never been "enlightened" by literacy at any time prior to this, leaving one only to speculate what Mr. Shlain had in mind when he refers to the peoples of Europe as having lost literacy. Read this book if you're relatively ignorant of history, philosophy, art history, or physics and you'll learn a lot of survey material; just don't take Mr. Shlain's take on any of it too seriously: by the end of reading the book, you'll know about as much as he seems to.
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Summary: He gets the physics wrong!
Review: I can't believe the editors of this book let it get out the door. The physics is almost completely and in all ways wrong. Given that the author is neither an art historian nor a physicist, I can understand the attempt to use metaphor and generalisation in describing some of the very complicated matters of physics, but there is a difference between simplification and being completely, utterly, and in all ways wrong about the subject. For example, in the attempt to compare the advent of Modernism, with its pictures built on greys and browns, to the development of Relativity, he gives a simplified vision of what a person moving near the speed of light would see. The problem is that he says a person moving at that speed would see all the colors start to muddle together into a grey/brown morass. WRONG! And for at least three reasons. First, he is confusing the subtractive color model with the additive color model. When you pour paint together, you get a grey/brown mess because of impurities in the pigment. But that's because it's pigment. When you add all the colors of *light* together, you get WHITE. So, the man doesn't understand how color works. Second, moving near the speed of light does not change the way light behaves. You will still see all the colors of the rainbow...they will have just shifted along the electromagnetic spectrum. Think of it this way: You have a window that's, say, 2 feet wide. You can only see things if they are directly outside the window (light in the visible spectra). The light that comes in on the far-left side is colored red. Next to it is orange, etc. to violet on the right. But, there is more outside the window than what you can see through that limit (infrared, ultraviolet, radio, gamma, X, etc.) When you move, the position of the window shifts a bit. Move near the speed of light and it shifts a lot. You still see red, orange, yellow,...violet, but what is triggering those colors are wavelengths you couldn't see before. If you shift this window far into the radio wavelengths, you still have the light coming in on the far-left side appearing as red light...it's because you are moving that makes it appear as red. Third, moving near the speed of light causes an extension of the color spectra seen. That's because you are moving so fast that small differences in wavelength become very apparent. Light that is coming directly toward you is compressed while light that is glancing off the side is extended. So, the answer is not that you see a grey/brown mess that somehow artists were able to figure out and paint before the codification of Relativity. The answer is that you see a rainbow of colors. And this doesn't even begin to point out his flawed presumption that scientific information is only known when it gets published. Einstein published his treatise on Special Relativity in 1905, but the work started back in the 1800s, and that's only Einstein's contribution. The foundations of relativity and motion affecting observation go all the way back to Galileo. There is simply no excuse for the scientific errors in this book. If his physics is this poor, one wonders just how bad his art criticism is.
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