Bridging art and science through the ages
by Gail Cowan
We don't normally think about it this way, but artists
and scientists have a lot in common.
Both artists and scientists focus on how we view the nature of
reality. Both are committed to uncovering that which is hidden from
our view.
Artists, like scientists, study the world around them — materials,
people, culture, history, religion, mythology — and seek to
transform that information into something else.
And scientists and artists, each in their own way, investigate
their worlds, formulate theories about what's possible and
then test out those theories, bringing action to notion, idea and
concept: one in the studio; the other in the laboratory.
History is filled with creators whose work spans both art and science.
Pythagoras
Pythagoras was an Ionian mathematician and philosopher who lived and
taught in the late 6th Century BC. He is best known for formulating
the Pythagorean Theorem, which defines the relationship between the
three sides of a right triangle, but his theories included the mathematics
of music.
Pythagoras and his students observed that everything around them
was related to mathematics and felt that everything could be predicted
and measured in rhythmic cycles.
His theories about music as an acoustical science include the definition
of intervals, the distance between pitches, by rates of integers
or counting numbers. Pythagoras defined the Pentatonic scales which
are formed of five notes (from the Greek pente: five). Pythagoras
discovered numerical ratios corresponding to intervals of the musical
scale. He associated these ratios with what he called "harmony
of the spheres.”
Leonardo DaVinci
Leonardo DaVinci's accomplishments are staggering. Born in
Italy in 1452, DaVinci was a sculptor, painter, architect, musician,
anatomist, inventor and mathematician. Many people cite him as the
archetype of Renaissance man and an astonishing genius.
DaVinci left 1,565-pages of notebooks that include much of his
artistic and scientific observations. The notebooks record his intense
drive for a comprehensive knowledge of creation. DaVinci started
from books, but in almost every field of investigation, he moved
from traditional explanation to one based on his own experiments
and experience.
DaVinci's observations and experiments into the workings
of nature include the stratification of rocks, the flow of water,
the growth of plants, and the action of light. The mechanical devices
that he sketched and described were also concerned with the transmission
of energy. His solitary investigations took him from surface to structure,
from catching the exact appearance of things in nature to visually
analyzing how they function.
George Seurat
George Seurat, whose masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, was
completed in 1885, was fascinated by the perception of color. Unlike
his predecessors, Seurat, did not mix his own paint. French chemists
in the early 19th century had invented premixed paints packaged in
tubes.
Using these new paints, Seurat invented a technique called Pointillism
to investigate how the eye perceives adjacent colors. Up close, the
surface of his painting contains thousands of painted dots and dashes
that when viewed from a distance interact so that they were perceived
as vibrant blended colors and larger, whole forms. Seurat carried
his scientific approach to the use of color theory to the edges of
the image, where he included the range of the visible spectrum in
the painting's border.
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin, born in 1868 in Texas, was an itinerant pianist who
was a master of ragtime — a unique blend of European classical
styles combined with African American harmony and rhythm. In 1893,
Joplin played in sporting areas adjacent to the Colombian Exposition
in Chicago.
By playing “Blue” notes right next to each other instead
of crushing them as Blues artists would do later, Joplin was able
to merely suggest a new sound. By doing so, he was able to bring
Ragtime music into upper-class drawing rooms — and ultimately
into our culture's shared musical lexicon.
Albert Einstein
Born in Ulm, Germany in 1879, Albert Einstein is still considered
one of the greatest scientific and mathematical geniuses in history.
In 1905, at the age of 26, he set forth his theory of relativity
which discards the concept of time and space as absolute entities,
and views them as relative to moving frames of reference. At the
same time, he postulated light quanta or photons, comparable to energy
quanta, and on these based his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
In 1911, he asserted the equivalence of gravitation and inertia.
In 1916, he completed the mathematical formulation of his general
theory of relativity, which included gravitation as a determiner
of curvature of space-time continuum and represented gravitation
as a field rather than a force. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for
his contributions to theoretical physics.
But physics was certainly not the whole story about Albert Einstein.
He was drawn to art, music and spirituality.
” The most beautiful thing we can experience,
is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to
wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” --
Einstein
In 1929 he said, “If I were not a physicist, I would probably
be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music.
I see my life in terms of music ... I get most joy in life out of
music.” Einstein once said that time is the means of God for
not having everything happen simultaneously. In a similar way space
might exist due to the wish of God not to have everything be on the
same spot. There is interspace between the objects that allows us
to imagine freedom, that movement is possible, that things not yet
having become manifest could appear. In this space each one of us
moves in his own personal body-vehicle to explore existence.
" True art is characterized by an irresistible
urge in the creative artist.” I am enough of an artist to draw
freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
-- Einstein
Whether they do it consciously or intuitively, both artists and
scientists rely on the principles of mathematics and physics, to
achieve their goals. And, at the same time, both science and art
rely on the creative questioner to ask, “Why do we do it this
way?” and “Why not try something else and see what happens?”
Because that's when something interesting shows up in music
and science that makes the world a better place to live.
As Einstein said, “Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.”
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