Art & Physics – Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (1991) – Leonard Shlain

`The artist employs illusion and metaphor. The physicist uses number and equation.
`Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.
`Metaphor – is a mental innovation arising out of a unique combination of feeling states and images. It allows a leap across a chasm from one thought to the next. They have several different levels of meaning simultaneously perceived and supply a plasticity to language without which communication would be less interesting. They’re cousins are similes, analogies, allegories, proverbs, and parables and each in their own way allow multiple simultaneous means of interpreting one single set of words.
`The most compelling combination of metaphor and image is art. The artist frequently uses visual metaphor to transport a viewer from a neutral affective state to complex feeling state, for example, awe.
`When art is successful in metaphorically bearing us across and above, there are no transitions. It is an all at once quantum jump. When this happens, we somehow know we are in the presence of great art.
`The artist often juxtaposes different features of reality and synthesizes them.
`Art illuminates, imitates, and interprets reality.
`Some artists create a language of symbols for things, which there are yet to be words.
`Radical innovators in art embody the preverbal stages of new concepts that will eventually change a civilization.
`Begins with the assimilation of unfamiliar images.
`Abstract ideas give rise to a descriptive language.
`The brains highest function is thinking.
`To affix a name to something is the beginning of control over it.
`Revolutionary art is the preverbal stage of a civilization first contending with a major change in its perception of the world.
`Visionary art alerts the other members that a conceptual shift is about to occur in the thought system used to perceive the world.
`Volume, space, mass, force, light, colour, tension, relationship, and density.
`Artists often choose signs, symbols, and allegories.
`Art offers perceptions of reality that erases linguistic and national boundaries.
`The inner eye of imagination and the external world of things.
`Objective reality is seen through the filter of each person’s temperament.
`Opinion – inner spectral vision unique to each individual of how the world works.
`Consensus – when a critical mass of people agrees on one viewpoint.
`Paradigm – when an entire civilization reaches a consensus about how the world works (Priori Postulates). 2 + 2 will always equal 4, all right angles are equal.
`Euclidean space and Aristotelian time have formed a paradigm that has been remarkably enduring.
`When the time comes to change a paradigm the artist is most likely to be in the forefront.
`Subjectivity is the creative wellspring of all art.
`Begin with wonder and end in wisdom.
`Art generally anticipates scientific revisions of reality.

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