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I got a kick out of seeing this article in The NYTimes this morning in the light of the recent discussion of art and computers. I read "Einstein's Dreams" a number of years ago; it's a lot of fun to read. I was particularly interested in the comments of Dr. Lightman, astrophysicist turned writer: "He said he had been thinking, he explained, about the tension between science and art, the rational and the intuitive.Einstein's dreams, he realized, were the bridge. Dr. Lightman said he did not buy into Snow's 'two cultures' separated by a gulf, which he characterized as a 'negative perception.' Rather, he said, science and art are complementary to each other, 'two different ways of being in the world.' Science is about questions that have answers. Art is about questions that do notl It is the lack of answers and the sense of being haunted by them that gives art its power, Dr. Lightman said." I would disagree with that characterization of art. For me, art gives answers to deeper questions; science is helpful as a tool that helps clarify what some of the questions might be; it also provides important information about the world that I need in order to clarify the issues that I need to pay attention to. But I certainly agree that the two are related and I would argue, essential to each other. That connects to my belief that all elements in our lives are connected; are all part of a whole. As I've said before, the rational, emotional, spiritual, physical, etc. are all elements of a greater whole. Selma [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lab Coat Chic: The Arts Embrace Science January 28, 2003 By DENNIS OVERBYE We get tremory In this world with no memory Life makes only partial sense Knowing only the present tense. You might have thought that "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," the 1905 paper in which Albert Einstein proposed the theory of relativity, would be an unlikely subject for song and dance. After all, haven't art and science been at war since the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow said so in a famous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures"? The four lines quoted above are from the libretto of a musical under development and sung last week in the Kaufmann Theater at the American Museum of Natural History. Called "Einstein's Dreams," produced by Brian Schwartz and written by Joanne Sydney Lessner and Joshua Rosenblum, it is based on the best-selling novel of the same name, a tone poem of ruminations on time and mortality in early 20-century Switzerland by Dr. Alan Lightman. The producers have their own dreams of a Broadway run. Remarkably, that was not the sole relativity show in town last week. A completely different adaptation of "Einstein's Dreams" is playing until Feb. 1 at the Culture Project Theater in Greenwich Village. If you squint hard enough, you can imagine a cultural moment occurring. On Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah - the mecca of independent filmmakers, epitome of gritty cool - the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation handed out the first of its $20,000 awards, to be given yearly, for films about science or technology. The winner, "Dopamine," directed by Mark Decena and written by him and Timothy Breitbach, is a romantic comedy about a computer engineer who believes that love is merely a chemical reaction and a schoolteacher who has a more romantic bent. All this follows a string of plays that deal with science or scientists that have lighted up Broadway and beyond, led by "Copenhagen," about two physicists arguing about the atomic bomb, and "Proof," about mathematicians, each winning a Tony Award for best play. A year ago, "A Beautiful Mind," based on Sylvia Nasar's biography of the troubled mathematician John Nash, won the Oscar for best picture. Meanwhile, a glossy new science magazine, Seed, dedicated to documenting "the global science scene" and promising never to put a dinosaur on the cover, has begun putting out issues with fashion models on the cover and articles on biowarfare inside. Once, a decade or so ago, there were Science Wars. Scientists were being pilloried by religious conservatives for undermining spiritual values and by postmodernists for their pretensions of objectivity. If the scientists were in the movies, they were the bad guys, chasing E. T. Are we now on the verge of Science Chic? Science will, of course, always be hip to scientists. Should they care whether anyone else thinks they are hip? Like the rest of us, they would like a date for the prom or a table at Nobu. And the perception of uncool presents a recruiting problem for the next generation. But the hippest thing, any scientist will tell you, is the thrill of the intellectual chase and the discovery itself, the moment you alone know something new about the genome or the 11th dimension. Translating that thrill into the popular culture has always been a hard sell. "If we judge by movies and TV, science is a nonstarter," said Dr. Leon Lederman, a Nobel laureate and a former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who has been involved in an effort to develop and sell an "ER"-style television series about scientists. When this writer sent e-mail requests to astronomers and physicists for memorable portrayals of science, there was nothing but complaints. Movie producers, they said, often spend a lot of money to get small details right - Post-it notes on the computers in "Contact," snippets of authentic jargon or real equations in "Good Will Hunting." Yet they get the big picture wrong, often portraying scientists as madmen or geeks. "On the other hand," said Dr. Sean Carroll, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, "we don't necessarily do so bad compared to doctors or lawyers, I would guess." The Sundance Award is the latest step in a multipronged effort by the Sloan Foundation to redress the situation by encouraging filmmakers, writers and playwrights to explore scientific and technological themes. The effort includes collaborations with the Ensemble Studio Theater and the Manhattan Theater Club to commission and produce new plays. The film project began six years ago with awards and workshops in film schools, said Doron Weber, program director of the foundation, and it has been working its way up the food chain since then. The point of such films, which scientists do not always get, is not to "teach" science - an effort that is invariably fatal to a novel or a movie. "You can treat the drama of scientific thinking," said Dr. Lightman, who was a Sundance judge. A trim soft-spoken man with a slight Southern accent, Dr. Lightman was an astrophysicist with degrees from Princeton and Caltech before he gradually shifted his energies to writing. He said the idea for his novel came to him first as a title. He had been thinking, he explained, about the tension between science and art, the rational and the intuitive. Einstein's dreams, he realized, were the bridge. Dr. Lightman said he did not buy into Snow's "two cultures" separated by a gulf, which he characterized as a "negative perception." Rather, he said, science and art are complementary to each other, "two different ways of being in the world." Science is about questions that have answers. Art is about questions that do not. It is the lack of answers and the sense of being haunted by them that gives art its power, Dr. Lightman said. "Einstein's Dreams," published in 1993, is a series of poetic parables in which different notions of time apply. Dr. Lightman said that the film rights had been optioned several times, but that no one had been able to figure out what to do with it. On the other hand, he estimated that 15 to 20 versions of his novel had been produced on stage. He has not seen all of them. "Sometimes we don't even know about them until afterward," he said. Now, in terms of audience and money, the lowliest martial arts movie is a bigger deal than the biggest Broadway splash. So if physics seems to be doing better on stage than on screen lately, maybe that is because plays require fewer resources. So they can afford to be experimental. Or maybe it's just that words, and thus ideas, are more important in theater than in the movies, a visual medium. But a recent immersion in "Einstein's Dreams," the plays, made one wonder whether the Janus faces of science and art might melt together more easily in the shadowy half-light of the stage, where a little greasepaint and our own conspiring imaginations help create the scene, than in the blinding information-rich literalness of celluloid. Halfway through a Holderness Theater Company production of "Einstein's Dreams," written by Kipp Erante Cheng and directed by Rebecca Holderness, there occurs a moment that can only happen in theater. In a passage from the book, Einstein plays the violin and wonders whether he should leave his wife. In the play a baby-faced, frizzy-haired Einstein, played with mute intensity by Jared Coseglia, picks up his wife, Mileva (Kate Kohler Amory). She wraps her legs around his waist, and he walks around playing her, sliding the violin bow across her backside. Einstein looks as if he is thinking, but it is our own thoughts that seem to matter. A man making love to a woman? A scientist coaxing secrets out of nature? Who is this man? What is this alchemy called science? It reminded me of a scene near the end of "Copenhagen," when the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg thinks out loud as he begins to run a calculation crucial to the atomic bomb through his head. Suddenly a flash and an apocalyptic roar - Einstein's darkest dream - flood the theater. If Heisenberg does the calculation, the Germans build their bomb and history is horribly altered. At moments like this, theater returns to its mythic roots as a place where the actual and the symbolic, the sacred and profane, pity and awe, meet. Once it was the gods giving us grief. But the lesson of the 20th century has been that they have left the house. Now it is just us on the stage we have conjured, with the godlike powers and responsibilities that science has given us - and with it the possibility of truly godlike failures. Science is the new mythology. "There is a hope that science will open like a flower and reveal to us how we came to consciousness," Ms. Holderness said. Her company had been looking for a break from doing Shakespeare, she said, and she was attracted by the language and "big ideas" in Einstein. "There is a strong quest for God in Einstein," Ms. Holderness said. "If you're going to spend a lot of time in a dark room, you might as well have something to think about." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/28/science/28ESSA.html?ex=1044765755&ei=1&en=49a844bb022df1d2 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
