Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Fundamental Themes in Physics from the History of Art

  • Published:
Physics in Perspective Aims and scope Submit manuscript

It is amazing how compact a unity every historical epoch presents throughout its various manifestations.

—Spanish philosopher and essayist, José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)

Abstract

Mindful of a stated Project 2061 goal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, emphasizing that “scientific literacy includes seeing the scientific endeavor in the light of cultural and intellectual history,” and in the continuing spirit of narrowing the gap between the “two cultures” by enhancing STEAM awareness and education, this essay illustrates, quite literally through well-known works of Western art, the striking parallels between fundamental themes in physics and the visual arts through history. These connections include: the identification of microcosm–macrocosm analogies in prehistoric proto-science; the beginning of the appreciation in pre-classical antiquity of the lawfulness of nature under the aegis of a Divine Lawgiver; the rise of rationalism and the first theories of the architecture of matter during the so-called “Greek miracle”; the overlapping role of theology’s “handmaiden” during the emblematic medieval Age of Faith; Renaissance renovations and the triumph of the “mechanical universe” as the capstone of the scientific revolution in the early modern period; the influence on physics of the Romantic notion of an underlying unity in all of nature, and the increasing abstraction in both art and physics during the nineteenth century; and, finally, the parallels between twentieth-century art and the physics of relativity and quantum theory, concluding with examples from modern cosmology.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Credit: Wikimedia Commons, user 120, licensed under CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 4

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 5

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 6

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 7

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 8

Credit: Derby Museum and Art Gallery, England, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 9

Credit: Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768. Presented by Edward Tyrrell, 1863, The National Gallery, London, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 10

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 11

Credit: Photo by the author

Fig. 12

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 13

Credit: Reproduction permission kindly provided by Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Fig. 14

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 15

Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 16

Credit: Photo by the author

Fig. 17

Credit: Photo by the author

Fig. 18

Credit: Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Wikimedia Commons

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Another early example is the exquisitely fashioned pendant found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, depicting the solar disk being propelled across the sky by Khepri, the scarab beetle manifestation of the sun god Ra rolling the sun before him like a ball of dung, with egg-encrusted dung appearing to give life to beetle progeny in the microcosm just as the sun was revered for promoting life in the macrocosm.

  2. To these four terrestrial elements, Aristotle added an ethereal “fifth essence”—the quintessence—a pure, immutable substance filling the celestial realm above the terrestrial sphere (defined by the orbit of the moon; the word is used today to denote the most perfect manifestation of a quality or thing). Interestingly, these five elements are analogous to the four states of ordinary matter recognized today—solid (earth), liquid (water), gas (air), and plasma (fire)—with the quintessence finding its modern counterpart in the dark matter/energy that accounts for nearly all of the “stuff” in the universe.

References

  1. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 335.

  2. E. C. Krupp, ed., In Search of Ancient Astronomers (New York: Doubleday, 1979); Evan Hadingham, Early Man and the Cosmos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).

  3. Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (New York: Continuum, 2005).

  4. See for example David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  5. Christiane Joost-Gaugier, “Plato and Aristotle and Their Retinue: Meaning in Raphael’s School of Athens,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 137, no. 1593 (2001), 149–64.

  6. Robert L. Oldershaw, “The New Physics—Physical or Mathematical Science?,” American Journal of Physics 56, no. 12 (1988), 1075–80. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s warning to a young Luke Skywalker that “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them!” is Hollywood’s nod to the debate, taking place in this case a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

  7. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science (ref. 4); Daniel W. Graham, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  8. Emanuel Loewy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, trans. J. Fothergill (London: Duckworth & Co., 1907); David Park, The How and the Why: An Essay on the Origins and Development of Physical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 68–70.

  9. Albert Einstein, letter to J. S. Switzer, April 13, 1953. Quoted in Alice Calaprice, The Quotable Einstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 180.

  10. Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993).

  11. William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 303–32.

  12. Lynn White, Jr., “Natural Science and Naturalistic Art in the Middle Ages,” American Historical Review 52, no. 3 (1947), 421–25.

  13. J. V. Field, The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  14. See for example Laurence M. Principe, The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  15. Maurice Daumas, Scientific Instruments of the 17th & 18th Centuries and Their Makers (London: Portman Books, 1972).

  16. Laura J. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015).

  17. John H. Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (1926; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 389–426.

  18. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  19. Quoted in R. C. Stauffer, “Persistent Errors Regarding Oersted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism,” Isis 48, no. 1 (1957), 33–50; quote from Hans Christian Ørsted, Selected Scientific Works of Hans Christian Ørsted, ed. and trans. Karen Jelved, Andrew D. Jackson, and Ole Knudsen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), xxix.

  20. Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 3 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1855), 1.

  21. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 67.

  22. Albert Michelson, 1894 address at the dedication of the University of Chicago’s Ryerson Physical Laboratory, reproduced in The University of Chicago Quarterly Calendar 3, no. 2 (August 1894), 12–15, on 15.

  23. Emilio Segré, From X-Rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists and Their Discoveries (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1980).

  24. See for example Lynn Gamwell Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  25. Quoted in Arthur Miller, Imagery in Scientific Thought: Creating 20th-Century Physics (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1984), 148.

  26. Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991); Arthur Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

  27. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. ed. (1983; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

  28. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Italian Futurism and ‘The Fourth Dimension,’” Art Journal 41, no. 4 (1981), 317–23.

  29. William Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).

  30. Peter Blanc, “The Artist and the Atom,” Magazine of Art 44 (1951), 145–52.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, One Aerospace Boulevard, Daytona Beach, FL, 32114, USA

    Robert Fleck

Authors
  1. Robert Fleck
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robert Fleck.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Robert Fleck is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. His PhD in astronomy is from the University of Florida.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Fleck, R. Fundamental Themes in Physics from the History of Art. Phys. Perspect. 23, 25–48 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-020-00269-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-020-00269-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation