------------
Sure be cautious. But also be free to think about it. (It was a nice link to the house.)
Instead of trying to match physics with say painting, which sounds absurd at first glance, try to consider all the activities that compose the arts and sciences as forming an intellectual history of some sort. Then try to ask the question, how come the arts, sciences, and mathematics seem to march along the same historical path (alias for conceptual trajectory), almost hand in hand?
This isn't an art question or science question, it's more of a cultural history question. This kind of thinking isn't like empirical science.
[Reading through the link to Einstein's summer house, reminded me Einstein's main connection with the arts, was through music since he played the violin---which I had forgotten. Anybody know what he played and if he showed any interest in the `new' music of say Webern and Schoenberg? I am guessing Einstein preferred the Romantics the post-Beethoven stuff.]
In any event, ask what does a mathematician, a physicist, and a visual artist have in common? Depending on some of the detail (you have to pick the right people here), they are all dealing with and analyzing space as part of their conceptual world. The most obvious connecting link is geometry.
To make a long story short, the visual arts discovered that their representations of space could abandon traditonal perspective and instead activate the pictorial space, in effect make it plastic, make it an abstract entity in its own right. This concept of the plasticity of pictorial space was slow to develop through the 19thC. And this plasticity wasn't just confined to space, but also applied to the objects in that space. Here is a Cezanne still life:
http://www.racingmix.com/word/cezanne_peppermint.jpg
For constrast, here is a David who was a master at rendering the `deep' space of traditional perspective:
http://collectingtokens.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/jacques-louis_david_006.jpg
So, after what's called analytic cubism, Picasso (returned to a previous style system started with Les Demoiselle..) and others began to morph representational forms like faces and bodies into any sort of shape they wanted and unify the object's form with the space it was supposed to inhabit, essentially making the object and space a single sort of bio-morphic entity. Here is example:
http://xxfactor.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/girl-before-a-mirro.jpg
But the use and concept of a plastic kind pictorial space have always been around. See non-western art, children's art, African masks, or Cezanne. Picasso of course used all of them in his work at various points.
So what does this have to do with math and physics? Think Mobius strip and Klein Bottle.
In a more technical and obviously different mode of thought, the development and expansion of mathematical ideas about space followed a series of discoveries starting approximately about the same time, in mid-19thC. The opening issue had to do with Euclid's parallel axiom. It essentially didn't fit with the other axioms for a point, line, and plane. It was realized that space didn't have to be Euclidean, and all the other axioms would still work just well in hyerbolic, ellipitical or a projective space. So what unified all these together? The answer started with Felix Klein's Erlangen Program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlangen_program
This was really a grand scale project and was developed much further under Hilbert who took over directorship of the mathematics institute at Gottingen. While Klein called the program for geometry Erlangen, named after the university were he first taught, he developed it at Gottingen. (Gottingen produced something like a dozen famous German mathematicians and theoretical physicists in the pre-WWII era.) See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert
Many of these guys came here in the 1930s (right along with the architects, designers, writers, filmakers, painters, musicians and philosophers) and helped develop the US military industrial complex, nuclear weapons of course, but also helped bring US math and science higher education up to speed.
[The arts crew tried to graph German high modernist culture onto the rather frumpy LA scene for awhile from the mid-30s to the end of the 40s. But the dominant reactionary political culture won't have any of it. Many like Mann, Adrono, Horkhiemer, and others left as soon as they saw the LA MaCarthite establishment gear up. Some like Walter Bruno stayed. Schoenberg died in 1951, so he escaped the anti-commie crusade, in a manner of speaking. Too bad.
It's this local history that also fascinates me, because at its core, there are the sorts of philosophical-political reactions Leo Strauss and other rightwingers had to the US political and cultural climate---well and how the US scene absorbed much of these influences and reactions with a certain nasty synergy.]
Anyway, math and physics are still struggling with the inventions and implications of different concepts of space, as are the arts.
And, so is the culture itself in some more vague and generalized way, since high speed communications and multiple media are now inner connected in vast global networks*. That, in effect alters our concepts of space and time, pretty much along the lines that McLuhan suggested, including of course the Global Village and the Virtual Empire, i.e the presumed dominance of the US and its delusions of unlimited power. And of course the spatio-temporal cascading meltdown of interlocking economies.
While I certainly see the dark sides to all this much along the lines that NcLuhan and others sketched, there are also brighter sides.
(to be continued... The next post starts with the *footnote...)
