During the twentieth century many of these means of representation underwent a change from certainty to uncertainty, and today our world is more tentative and open to doubt and uncertainty. This lack of fixed strategies means that there are more ways to explore the world…” (Peat 97 – 98). There are two things I want to take away from what Peat claims above: 1) that the representations of the world create the world – perception is reality, and 2) that connectedness and holism offer richer, more comprehensive representations. A certain, stable world no longer exists. So in this uncertain, in-flux world, we need models which adapt and stay continuous. We understand through models. It is how we convey an idea to a person – we use a model. The idea itself cannot transfer from one mind to the other, rather we need to create some sort of representation – be it visual, verbal, kinesthetic or audio – but this representation stands in place of the idea. If we use a model only from science, or only from art, then we are limiting ourselves. We are limiting ourselves to a 20th century, compartmentalized, mechanized representation. Bohr shows us that this will not work. Newton and Descartes did not have the whole picture, and not everything can be measured like a clockwork. This alone is a fantastic argument for integrative studies. But not only is the world ready for a new normal in representations and models, so too, is the next generation of students.
They crave a far more comprehensive, meaningful, narrative which explains the inner and outer worlds. Peat says, “scientific studies tell us that the ability to see the world involves integration of a variety of different strategies operating between the eye and the brain” (Peat 93). If it is natural for the human and the natural world to be integrated, why do we spend so much time de-integrating? Palmer and Zajonc make a similar argument: the different disciplines only capture a fragmented image of the whole picture. When art, science, the humanities, business, education and communications separate themselves from one another: these different camps narrow in on a paradigmic vantage point. With such a zoomed in perspective, the greater, composite is lost. It is like looking at Georges-Pierre Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. From a distance it appears ethereal – full of impossible whimsy and depth. But as you close in on sections of the painting, you start to lose the mystery. If you get right up on the image, so close that your nose nearly touches the canvas, you find that the image is composed of millions of colored daubs. It is not unlike a digital image broken up into millions and millions of pixels. Certainly examining the image up close allows you to understand how it was created – it gives you a better sense of the time and meticulous effort by Seurat. Furthermore, close examination also glimpses Seurat’s theories about optical mixing and color juxtaposition. But does this knowledge, alone, allow you to really understand and appreciate the image? Or does this knowledge only have meaning under the context of the whole, beautiful painting? This is the issue education systems face today.
Autogamously, we narrow in on the individual colored daubs. We study these daubs, instruct others about the daubs and explain the process with precise objectivity. But we rarely examine the whole picture. We rarely see the allogamous beauty created by the interchange of color, light, shape and form. It requires a great step backwards, and then a complete change in perspective. “Monet’s wish to return to direct visual experience, Cezanne’s doubt as to what his sensations were telling him, and Cubism’s attempt to integrate different possible viewpoints in time should coincide with a general change of Western consciousness whereby… doubt, relativism, and lack of certainty entered in many different ways” (Peat 109). These artists were all trying to express the unnerving unbalance being explored by the transition from certainty to uncertainty. Unraveling thousands of years of philosophy, mathematics and natural science is such a difficult task, that it takes a lot of time to come to grips with its implications. How long? Well in Western culture, approximately a century.
At the advent of 1900, the perspectives in science and art were drastically changing. It is during this time that Einstein and Picasso both have their “miracle” periods – here Einstein publishes his work on the photoelectric effect and relativity, while Picasso begins breaking down the naturalism in art pushing it towards abstraction and conceptualism. But it wasn’t until the 21st century that this unraveling of reality was truly embraced. Both 20th century new physics and 20th century new art can be traced to the work of Henri Poncairé, who was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and a philosopher of science, before the end of the 19th century. Poncairé’s work focused primarily on the precursor to chaos theory (commonly described by the “butterfly effect”) and algebraic topology (illustrated by the Möbius strip, the torus and the trefoil knot). Because of Poncairé’s forward-thinking work, he is often considered a polymath (a genius in many fields). After Poncairé’s death, the French mathematician, Esprit Jouffret, popularized Poincaré’s descriptions of the fourth dimension in his Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions, published in 1903. These ideas directly inspired Pablo Picasso’s Cubism and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Both Picasso and Einstein studied Poncairé’s theories which lead to the breakdown of convention in the fields of art and physics.
Most abstract art can trace its origins to Cubism and our most groundbreaking, world-bending scientific notions can be traced to Einstein’s work. In many ways we can say that Poncairé is the godfather of the 20th century, as many of the cultural and worldview shifts in this era can be traced to the effect of Picasso and Einstein. I am obviously truncated history and looking at it through a specific lens, but I am doing so to demonstrate a point. The 20th century was noted for its segregation of ideas. But this was not always the case – in fact, Poncairé explored notions of reality through a far more holistic approach, albeit described primarily mathematically and philosophically. But then, his work was dissected and divided. Picasso took Poncairé and went in one direction and Einstein went in the other. One man explores these ideas visually and symbolically, while the other does so scientifically and mathematically. Both Picasso and Einstein have their great breakthroughs before 1910 and became worldwide celebrities for their work, yet neither man encounters the other. The two men are so segregated from one another in 20th century paradigms, that their connection to Poncairé has only been recently exposed. In a way, this almost seems like a reverse-allogamy. The ideas began at a source and cross-pollinated – mathematics crossing into art and science, respectively. But then the seed idea was divided and tracked within separate disciplines. Here the ideas were cultivated in an autogamous model, keeping the artistic or scientific version of the idea separated. This version of the idea propagated, multiplied and reproduced within the narrow parameters of the separate fields.
Most importantly, this scenario explains how cross-pollination leads to innovation through creative solutions. The inspiration comes from saturation, as Edwards claims. Surrounding oneself with varied resources and pulling, mixing, combining, blending these resources in new ways leads to some remarkable outcomes – in this case, Einstein’s and Picasso’s miracle periods. So art and science share a common inspiration, but does that mean they are one in the same discipline? Peat concludes that these serendipitous moments arise from “actual change[s] in human consciousness involving, for example, a change in the way we “see” the world” occurring “at a certain point, when the “time is right” and “something was in the air” (Peat 110). “Rather than the one influencing the other directly each was picking up and manifesting the seeds of change” (Peat 110). Peat questions why “so many remarkable parallels exist” between various fields of study and offers an explanation for zeitgeist: “Maybe these manifestations in art, science, literature and other fields should be more properly called “synchronicities” – borrowing a term from Carl Jung (Peat 110).
Peat cites various examples of these moments which seem to be coincidental but share some “unrelated cause”: 1) Dutch painters begin exploring the properties of light as it enters a room while Newton breaks a beam of light down in a prism, 2) Georges-Pierre Seurat develops pointillism in painting, breaking down images into “dots of color” just as Max Planck reveals light consists of individual quantas, and 3) Picasso’s Cubism and Einstein’s theory of relativity begin reforming the way time and space are represented (Peat 109 – 110). We find ourselves here once more – waiting to seed the new normal in education.
references
1. Rimer, Sara. "Study: Many College Students Not Learning to Think Critically." The Hechinger Report January 18 (2011). Print. Teachers College, Columbia University
2. Pink, Daniel H. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead, 2006. Print.
3. Peat, F. David. From Certainty to Uncertainty: the Story of Science and Ideas in the Twentieth Century. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry, 2002. Print.
4. “Grow up? Not so fast,” By Lev Grossman. Time, January 16, 2005.
5. Robbins, Alexandra, and Abby Wilner. Quarterlife Crisis: the Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001. Print.
6. Palmer, Parker J., Arthur Zajonc, and Megan Scribner. The Heart of Higher Education: a Call to Renewal. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Print.
7. Shoemaker, Jean Eklund, and Larry Lewin. "Curriculum and Assessment: Two Sides of the Same Coin." The Changing Curriculum Number 8 50.May 1993 (1993): 55-57. Print.
8. Fiero, Gloria K. Landmarks in Humanities. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009. Print.
9. Tufte, Edward. "PowerPoint Is Evil; Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely." Wired Sept. 2003. Print. Issue 11.09
10. Reynolds, Garr. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Pub., 2008. Print.
11. Reynolds, Garr. "Storytelling Lessons from Bill Cosby." Rev. of Keynote Speeches and Comedic Career. Web log post. Presentation Zen. Garr Reynolds, 28 June 2011. Web. 30 June 2011.
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