have you read this?: "Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc", by Arthur I Miller?
off to grade relativity homeworks ;-)
Les
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No, I haven't read this.
Searching for the book I found an interesting blurb from Alibris:
``...Professor Miller asserts that both Einstein and Picasso were influenced by mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincare's LA SCIENCE ET L'HYPOTHESE. Although the two intellectuals never met, Miller reasons that the painter and physicist were working simultaneously, using different mediums, to solve the same problem about representing space and time.''
I just ordered both, Miller and Poincare. I've never read Poincare, mostly following the Germans instead. This was probably an artifact of who was translated into English more often.
The whole topic of the relationship between early 20thC science, art and philosophy is one of my favorite subjects. I've been playing around with it for years. There is an underlying similitude, but I've never really figured how this mutually re-enforcing influence works. About the only concrete thing I can think of is something along the lines of changes in the cultural-social climate. This begs the question, since what changes the cultural-social climate?
Carpenter pointed out these correspondences, and his McLuhanesque explanations were the changes in communication and technology. I can't remember much of the detail, but his examples were railroads, electricity, the telegraph, mass printed newspapers.
This explanation makes sense, if you think of the perception effects of two mass transit trains passing each other in different directions in the dark. Or think about flipping back and forth through a newspaper to follow a particular story---the physical acts interrupts the linear continum, and the front page itself is not a linear format, it's random access, this story or that, or part of this one with part of that one. Well, of course all of print is broken up by ads too. And all that was part of what Joyce was playing around with.
Einstein used train analogies to get across the concepts of moving frames of reference. Obviously everybody in big cities used trains and could follow the analogies. Visually these effects are pretty stunning and are still used as special effects in action adventure flicks.
Here is an essay on McLuhn:
http://www.gingkopress.com/_cata/_mclu/_meggs.htm
Mass urban society with its modernized systems of communication and transportation itself was probably the mutual and most influencial source for changing concepts of time and space (one of McLuhn's thesis). One of his books is called The Mechanical Bride, subtitle The folklore of industrial man. Mechanical Bride refers to Marcel Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even... As the Cubist movement developed, many common and shared visual effects of urban machanized life were explicitly used.
The whole McLuhnesque view Carpenter presented links up with Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to create what I think of as the mythological envelop, or the totality of the public mind as somekind wild beast brain, the hive mind as it were.
(Just reading the above link, I remembered some of the effects of Carpenter's lectures, which he delivered in staccato, switching around wildly from one line of thought to another. The effect was mesmerizing. A full hour seemed like ten minutes.)
Also in that period (1880-1930), just about any avant guard event in the arts or the sciences was talked about, made the rounds in the papers and spawned all kinds of reactions, from excitment to dread, to violence. These ideas and events were given a great deal of nationalistic importance that built up to a frenzy as the French, English, Germans, Austrians, Italians, Russians, all competed with each other to beat the rest in any discovery in math, science, engineering or the arts. Guys like Henri Poincare and Thomas Mann were national heros.
I've read a lot of the literature and some of the math and science from that period, and of course studied the visual arts, and even got into the music a little. They are all wedded together and creat this fabulously rich world, they were all in a race to get `modern.'
In contrast the political economies and the political forces (class divisions and conditions) were terrible. Most of the European and certainly the US government repressed their progressive and radical movements. And then of course WWI exploded, with the Russian Revolution and Weimar following in its wake.
Here is a youtube link of McLuhan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GvQdDQv8g
Funny as hell that McLuhan is on YouTube---it's his perfect medium, and the cuts and splices moving back or forward in time---the 2:15min show is a great example of how he thought. Carpenter would have assigned YouTube in a heartbeat. Instead, I had to work out these thoughts the old fashioned way. I had to read about them, and study them.
(This is getting too long. So, it is continued on the next post)