Einstein, Picasso
Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc
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- US$11.99
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- US$11.99
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The most important scientist of the twentieth century and the most important artist had their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and in remarkably similar circumstances. This fascinating parallel biography of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso as young men examines their greatest creations -- Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Einstein's special theory of relativity. Miller shows how these breakthroughs arose not only from within their respective fields but from larger currents in the intellectual culture of the times. Ultimately, Miller shows how Einstein and Picasso, in a deep and important sense, were both working on the same problem.
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Intellectual historians widely acknowledge that Einstein's theory of relativity and Picasso's cubist paintings launched modernity. Although the physicist and painter never met, their creative geniuses developed simultaneously under similar social circumstances and during an unrivaled period of cultural ferment. Moreover, Miller, professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London, contends, both Einstein and Picasso were deeply influenced by mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincar 's treatise on non-Euclidean geometry, La Science et l'hypoth se. Both Einstein and Picasso borrowed from Poincar the idea of a temporal and spatial dimension beyond our own that could be captured in art and physics. Miller plunders previously unavailable sources as he narrates the parallel biographies of Einstein and Picasso. He traces in great detail the influences of photography, geometry and X-ray technology on Picasso's art as well as the influence of aesthetic theory on Einstein's science. Through close readings of the theory of relativity and Picasso's groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Miller argues that these two men were working on the same problem: "how to represent space and time at just the moment in history when it became apparent that these entities are not what we intuitively perceive them to be." In the 21st century, it is old news that artists and scientists struggle with the best ways to represent space and time. But Miller's eloquent and wide-ranging interdisciplinary history of ideas returns us to the beginning of the 20th century when two brilliant minds challenged reigning understandings of space and time and fashioned revolutionary models that imbue contemporary culture's understandings of itself and the physical world.
