I know I just threw a lot at you in a short amount of time. You may find yourself asking what all of this means and what any of it has to do with me or mae or singularity. Let me try to explain as briefly as possible because the most important part of this story is still to come.
I said at the beginning that this is a puzzle. I am not sure what the finished picture is supposed to look like yet. All I know is that these are the pieces that landed in my lap and let me know that I was part of something bigger than myself and my own little world. This is the mystery I have been given to solve. Would you please help me?
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Juan Maldacena
The Big Bang Machine
A Long Island particle smasher re-creates the moment of creation.
published online February 27, 2007
"Here is where the action takes place. This is where we effectively try to turn the clock back 14 billion years. Right above your head, about 13½ feet in the air."
Looking up, I try to imagine the events Tim Hallman is describing—atoms of gold colliding at 99.99 percent the speed of light; temperatures instantly soaring to 1 trillion degrees, 150,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. Then I try to picture a minuscule five-dimensional black hole, which, depending on your point of view, may or may not have formed at that same spot over my head. It's all a little much for an imagination that sometimes struggles with the plot of Battlestar Galactica.
Particles unleashed by the high-energy
collisions at the RHIC collider offer a
peek at the freekish far end of physics.
I'm standing in a Battlestar-scale room at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, where Hallman and about 1,200 other physicists labor away as latter-day demiurges. Here in the middle of Long Island, they are re-creating the opening microseconds of the universe's existence, the time when the first particles of matter—of everything—appeared.
The building we're in straddles a small segment of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced "Rick"), an ultrapowerful particle accelerator with a 2.4-mile circumference. For nine months of the year, a 1,200-ton detector as big as a house fills most of the room. But technicians have hauled the detector to an adjoining hangar-size area for maintenance, leaving me and Hallman free to amble just below the spot where a new form of matter exploded into being during the accelerator's recent runs. New, that is, in that it hasn't existed since the very beginning of time, or by the transcendently precise reckoning of physicists, since 10 millionths of a second after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
That was the last time particles called quarks and gluons—the most fundamental constituents of matter—roamed free in the cosmos, and it was a brief run. After just a hundred-millionth of a second, all the universe's quarks combined in triplets—held together by gluons—to form protons and neutrons. They have been locked inside the hearts of atoms ever since, until RHIC set them loose once again.
When the gold nuclei collide in the accelerator, they explode in a fireball just a trillionth of an inch wide. Inside that nanoscale fireball, temperatures exceed a trillion degrees, mimicking conditions in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. The nuclei literally melt back into their constituent quarks and gluons. Then, 50 trillionths of a trillionth of a second later, the fireball cools, just as the infant universe did as it expanded, and the quarks and gluons merge once again to form protons and neutrons.
With these experiments, Hallman and his Brookhaven colleagues are discovering something extraordinary about the early universe. The quarks and gluons that coursed through the newborn cosmos—and considerably more recently, through RHIC—took the form not of a gas, as physicists expected, but of a liquid. For a few instants, a sloshing soup of quarks and gluons filled the universe.
"I like to say that our theory of the early universe is now all wet," says Bill Zajc, a physicist at Columbia University and the leader of one of the experimental teams at RHIC.
  |
| In the circular tunnel at RHIC (above), |
He might have added that the theory is full of holes, little black ones from the fifth dimension, because it turns out that in a strange mathematical sense, the quarks and gluons at RHIC are equivalent to microscopic black holes in a higher-
dimensional space. Understanding just why that is so involves navigating a labyrinth of strange, heady, and heretofore seemingly unrelated theories of physics. In addition to challenging the conventional model of how the universe behaved in its earliest instants, the RHIC data also provide the first empirical support for a theory so enthralling it once had physicists dancing at a major conference. Moreover, the accelerator's results hint that string theory—the much-
ballyhooed "theory of everything," which has lately come under attack as being little more than a fanciful, if elegant, set of equations—may have something to say about how the universe works after all.
Before the physicists at Brookhaven could begin their pursuit of quarks, gluons, and hyperdimensional holes in space-time, they first had to prove that they wouldn't destroy the planet in the process. The doomsday risk never really existed, but making that clear to a worried public occupied the time of some of the world's leading physicists (see "Could a Man-Made Black Hole Swallow Long Island?" opposite page).
Once the doubts about Earth's safety had been laid to rest, the physicists at Brookhaven fired up their $500 million accelerator for the first time, in the summer of 2000. For Nick Samios, it was the culmination of two decades of work. Samios, who is now director of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center, headed Brookhaven from 1982 until 1997 and was the driving force behind the effort to build RHIC. "I'll tell you a story," he says over lunch at Brookhaven's staff cafeteria, leaning forward. The story's principals are Stalin; his chief of secret police, Lavrenty Beria; and Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov, a leading Soviet nuclear physicist. "Stalin and Beria are discussing the Soviet Union's first atomic-bomb test. 'Who gets the award if the test is a success?' Beria asks Stalin. 'Kurchatov.' So then Beria asks, 'Who gets shot if it doesn't work?' 'Kurchatov.' I feel like Kurchatov. Anyone else could disassociate themselves from the project. I couldn't."
One gamble Samios and his colleagues made 20 years ago was to trust in Moore's law, first formulated in 1965 by one of Intel's founders, which holds that computing power doubles roughly every 18 months. The type of accelerator Samios wanted to design would generate a petabyte of data—a million gigabytes—during each run, a rate that would fill the hard drive of one of today's typical desktop PCs every few minutes. In 1985 there were no computers that could handle anything close to that. But the "if we build it, the computers will be there" strategy paid off, and Samios's dream of a Big Bang machine became a reality.
To re-create the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, RHIC reaches higher energies than any other collider in the world. Unlike most accelerators, which smash together simple particles like individual protons, RHIC accelerates clusters of hundreds of gold atoms—with 79 protons and neutrons in each gold nucleus—to 99.99 percent the speed of light. In the resulting multiatom collisions, a melee of tens of thousands of quarks and gluons is released. They in turn form thousands of ordinary particles that can be tracked and identified.
"The physics at RHIC is complicated," Samios says with a touch of understatement. "Two big nuclei are hitting each other. Physicists are used to calculating a proton hitting a proton. We're hitting 200 nucleons with 200 nucleons [a nucleon is a proton or neutron]. With each collision we get thousands of particle tracks coming out. We had to build detectors that could count all of them. People weren't used to that. They were used to counting 50 in a collision.
"We hoped that RHIC would make great discoveries. We hoped that we'd break nuclei into quarks—the early universe was quarks and gluons, and then it cooled off and you got protons and us. We've done that. The question is–Is there something new going on? And the answer is yes."
Until the first gold atoms started making their 13-microsecond laps around RHIC's 2.4-mile-long perimeter, physicists thought they had a pretty good idea of what to expect from the collisions. The gold nuclei were supposed to shatter and form a hot gas, or plasma, of quarks and gluons. For physicists, watching the collisions in RHIC would be like watching the Big Bang unfolding before their eyes, but running in reverse—instead of a seething cloud of gluons and quarks settling down to form protons and neutrons, they would see the protons and neutrons burst open in sprays of quarks and gluons.
The universe has been around now for about 400 quadrillion seconds, but for physicists like Tom Kirk, the former associate lab director for high-energy and nuclear physics at Brookhaven, the first millionth of a second was more intriguing than any that followed.
"You may remember Steven Weinberg's book The First Three Minutes," says Kirk, referring to a classic account of the physics of the early universe. "Steve said after those first three minutes, the rest of the story is boring. Well, we could say after that first microsecond, everything else was pretty boring."
Kirk smiles and raises his eyebrows slightly, gauging whether I'm sympathetic to his remark, made, perhaps, only half in jest. When that first microsecond of eternity ended, the remainder of cosmic history unfolded with stolid inevitability. Once quarks finished clumping together as protons and neutrons, it was only a matter of time—and gravity—before the first simple atoms gathered in vast clouds to form stars and galaxies, which eventually begot us. (For an elaboration of your personal relationship with quarks, see "The Big Bang Within You," below.)
RHIC was designed to observe directly, for the first time, how quarks behave when freed from their nuclear prisons. The initial results, announced in 2005, stunned physicists everywhere. The particles released by the high-speed smashups were not bounding around freely the way atoms in a gas do but moving smoothly and collectively like a liquid, responding as a connected whole to changes in pressure within the fireball. The RHIC physicists describe their creation as a near "perfect" fluid, one that has extremely low internal friction, or viscosity. By the standards physicists use, the quarks and gluons make a much better liquid than water.
Since the similarity of quarks and gluons to water is not readily apparent to me, I take the subway to Columbia University to meet Zajc, the leader of one of RHIC's main experimental groups, hoping he'll enlighten me. "So how does one calculate the viscosity of those quarks and gluons?" he asks rhetorically. I sit silently, clueless, hiding my befuddlement behind a vigorous show of note taking. "It turns out there's a connection here to black-hole physics." That connection could be the first, long-awaited sign that string theory—which is in desperate need of evidence, any evidence, to support its ambitious claims to truth—is on the right track. The implausible-sounding connection between droplets of quarks and black holes may also vindicate a theory that once had 200 of the world's leading theorists jubilantly dancing the macarena.
Ehhhh! Maldacena!
M-theory is finished,
Juan has great repute.
The black hole we have mastered,
QCD we can compute.
Too bad the glueball spectrum
Is still in some dispute.
Ehhhh! Maldacena!
So goes Jeffrey Harvey's über-geek version of the once-ubiquitous 1996 hit. Harvey, a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago, wrote the lyrics to honor Juan Maldacena, a young Argentine string theorist now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
It was the summer of 1998, and Maldacena had just published a paper that to physicists bordered on the miraculous. He proposed an unexpected link between two ostensibly different theories of fundamental physics: string theory and quantum chromodynamics. String theory purports to describe all the elementary components of matter and energy not as particles but as vanishingly small vibrating strings. Photons, protons, and all the other particles are, according to this theory, just different "pitches" of vibration of these strings. If it is right, string theory would unify gravity and quantum mechanics in a single overarching framework—a goal that physicists have pursued for more than half a century. The problem is that there is no shred of experimental evidence that string theory is correct; all the arguments in its favor have been made entirely on the basis of its sophisticated mathematical structure. Direct experimental tests of string theory have thus far proved impossible, in part because strings are predicted to be so small that no conceivable particle accelerator could ever reach the energies needed to produce them.
Quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, on the other hand, is backed by decades of experiments. It describes the interactions of quarks and gluons. (Quarks come in three "colors," analogous to electric charge; hence the "chromo" in chromodynamics.) Unfortunately, unlike string theory, QCD says nothing about gravity, so physicists know they need a broader, more complete theory if they want to explain all of physics. Moreover, the equations of QCD are notoriously difficult to work with.
Enter Juan Maldacena. He developed a theory nearly identical to standard QCD, with the major difference being that in his version quarks come in many different colors rather than the usual three. Even though his theory does not fully apply to the universe we know—it doesn't correctly describe quarks—physicists frequently use such so-called toy models to get a handle on otherwise impossibly difficult problems. And Maldacena's theory had a remarkable feature, the one that inspired his colleagues to hit the dance floor. He proved that his pseudo-QCD and string theory are not in fact different theories at all; mathematically, they are entirely equivalent.
 |
| The site of the RHIC collider. |
Maldacena's realization raised an enormous question: If string theory and his slightly altered take on QCD are essentially one and the same beast, does that mean there is a way to connect string theory to the physics of the real world? For the next few years, Maldacena's tour de force remained largely a plaything for theorists, who almost immediately found intriguing ways to use it. Most important, his theory simplified the grueling calculations of QCD by offering a way to translate certain QCD problems into the more tractable mathematics of string theory. "Things that are hard to calculate in QCD are easy in string theory, and vice versa," says Horatiu Nastase, a string theorist at Brown University.
It was this power to shift problems from the QCD perspective to a string theory view that first led some physicists to see a link between the quarks and gluons at RHIC and the equations describing a black hole. Dam Thanh Son, a physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, was one of them. I called him to ask about what seems, on the face of it, an extraordinarily unlikely comparison. What could quarks and gluons possibly have in common with nature's ultimate trash compactors—ultradense concentrations of matter whose gravitational field is so powerful it curves space-time around itself, trapping anything that crosses its surface?
Son insists that black holes, quarks, and gluons really do have a big thing in common: They can be described by equations that govern the behavior of liquids. Then he explains that black holes—and quarks and gluons—are really no stranger than a cup of water.
"If you have a cup of water, and you disturb the water—say, you drop a pebble into it—the disturbance will not last forever. The water will come to rest. If you take a cup of honey, the motion ceases more quickly than in water; the more viscous the fluid, the quicker the perturbation of the system decays with time."
When something falls into a black hole, Son says, the surface of the black hole is disturbed, just like the water in a cup. "The black hole will wiggle for some time and come to rest. In these two processes"—disturbances in black holes and in water—"there is a connection at the mathematical level. The equation that describes the evolution of the stirring of water in a cup is similar in form to the equations that describe the evolution of the surface of a black hole. When I deform a black hole, it goes back and forth and then comes to rest. To describe that I use equations that are similar to equations used for any fluid."
As word spread that RHIC had created a quark-gluon fluid, Son and a number of other theorists began to wonder if they could use Maldacena's sleight of hand and substitute the equations of a black hole for the ones normally applied to quarks and gluons. The switch would make calculating the properties of the primordial particle soup much easier. Compared with a trillion-degree ruck of quarks and gluons, black holes are simple objects. (Which is why the lyrics to the Maldacena macarena go: "The black hole we have mastered, QCD we can compute.")
One property of the quarks and gluons that Son and his colleagues wanted to calculate was viscosity. Using a black-hole model, they predicted that quarks and gluons should have almost zero viscosity. When experimentalists at RHIC finally crunched through all their data, they confirmed that the quark-gluon fluid indeed had a low viscosity, at or near the theoretical minimum value predicted by the five-
dimensional black-hole model.
"Talk about a shot out of the blue," Zajc says. "Who would have thunk it? It is the most fascinating thing I've been involved with, to see this completely unexpected connection emerge and start having an impact on our field."
So does this success bolster the idea that string theory is the right way to unify all of physics?
"Absolutely," says Horatiu Nastase of Brown, who has also sought to understand RHIC's results in terms of a black hole. "At least that's my interpretation and the interpretation of other people. My understanding is that one is experimentally testing, in this indirect way, string theory."
Zajc and many other physicists aren't so sure. "I've thought an awful lot about this," he says. "But I'm not ready yet to claim that this validates string theory. Even the string theorists will tell you the viscosity result depends only on ordinary quantum mechanics—it's just that string theory gives you a snazzy way to calculate it."
In any event, the black hole under consideration is not the sort that could swallow Long Island. It's an entirely different animal. According to string theory, the universe may contain as many as 10 dimensions. Most of them are hidden, curled up on scales so small that we cannot sense or even detect them. The black hole in Son's calculation dwells in a theoretical world of five dimensions, where the effects of gravity drop so precipitously with increasing distance that a five-dimensional black hole poses no threat—if it even exists at all. Some physicists consider the five-dimensional black hole to be a mathematical convenience, a way to tackle a complex physical system. Others are open to a far more radical interpretation, however.
"What we think of as atomic nuclei, quarks, and gluons may really be objects that are projections, in a sense, on a screen," says Miklos Gyulassy of Columbia, sounding more like Plato philosophizing than like the theoretical physicist that he is. "We are on the screen. It looks to us like there are photons and these other particles, but they might really be manifestations, projections, from a higher-dimensional space, of objects that are more conveniently described in our world by saying, 'There is a photon,' or 'There is a gluon.' So the very hot quarks and gluons at RHIC may really be a hologram of some nasty black hole somewhere."
All of these issues and more will continue to be studied at RHIC and at an even more powerful accelerator nearing completion in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider, as the new accelerator is called, will be almost 17 miles in circumference and will reach energies 27 times higher than RHIC's.
"One question that screams out to be answered is whether we'll see the same sort of perfect fluid that we see at RHIC," Zajc says, "or whether we'll see something like an ideal gas where the quarks and gluons are essentially free. I think it will continue to be a perfect fluid, or very nearly so. But we've been surprised before in this field."
As to whether Maldacena's ideas will further strengthen string theory or prove a theoretical dead end is anyone's guess. The data, says Zajc, are simply too raw.
"This is what new discoveries look like from the inside," he says. "If you'll allow me to mix metaphors, it's sort of a Mixmaster of swirling ideas that may gradually be distilled into something elegant and nice. But at the moment we're watching the sausage-making process."
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/cover/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=
Friday, August 29, 2008
The Mind of God is a 1992 non-fiction book by Paul Davies. Subtitled The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, it is a whirlwind tour and explanation of theories, both physical and metaphysical, regarding ultimate causes. Its title comes from a quotation from Stephen Hawking: "If we do discover a theory of everything...it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would truly know the mind of God."
In the preface, Davies explains that he has been interested in ultimate causes since childhood, having annoyed his parents with unending "why's" about everything, with each answer demanding another "why," and usually ending with the reply, "Because God made it that way, and that's that!" In the book proper, Davies briefly explores: the nature of reason, belief, and metaphysics; theories of the origin of the universe; the laws of nature; the relationship of mathematics to physics; a few arguments for the existence of God; the possibility that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design; and his opinion of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, that "the search for a closed logical scheme that provides a complete and self-consistent explanation is doomed to failure."
He concludes with a statement of his belief that, even though we may never attain a theory of everything, "the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here."
Gödel Escher and Bach
http://books.google.com/books?id=aFcsnUEewLkC&dq=G%C3%B6del+Escher+and+Bach&pg=PP1&ots=FLOTcgkysZ&sig=lpN8hh4A4sI5qjtJwwz-0gAZZrk&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA792,M1
Einstein and Gödel
Friendship between Equals
DISCOVER
March 1, 2002
A picture taken in Princeton, New Jersey in August of 1950 shows Albert Einstein standing next to the Austrian logician, Kurt Gödel. Einstein is wearing baggy slacks and a rumpled shirt. His body sags. Dressed in a white linen suit, and wearing owlish spectacles, Gödel looks lean and almost elegant in comparison, the austerity of his expression softened by a certain odd sensuality that plays over the lower half of his face. Plainly at ease, the men are indulging the photographer.
When their friendship began in 1941, Kurt Gödel was thirty-five. Ten years earlier, in a relatively short but symphonic paper of some thirty-five pages, he had created one of the monuments of modern thought. Elementary arithmetic, he had demonstrated, is incomplete and incompleteable. Whatever the axiomatic system by which arithmetic is expressed, there are true statements that lie beyond the system’s reach. They cannot be demonstrated. Adding such statements to the system as further axioms does no good. The enriched system is also incomplete, the infection moving upward by degrees.
A number of mathematicians knew of Gödel’s achievement in 1941, but word of his genius had not left the cloister, where it was still conveyed in whispers. Einstein, on the other hand, was sixty-two, and one of the century’s mythic figures, his plump sad face known throughout the world.
The difference in their public stature were reflected in the nature of their friendship. In letters to his mother, Gödel took pleasure in affirming that through his friendship with Einstein, he was basking in reflected light. “I have so far been to his house two or three times,” he wrote (in 1946), “all for scientific discussions. I believe it rarely happens that he invites anybody to his house.”
Yet in the grandeur of their achievements, Einstein and Gödel stood alone, and so must have turned to one another at least in part because they could turn to no one else.
They were in their personalities quite different. Einstein was a man of unshakeable self-confidence, intellectually massive, unafraid. Gödel was, by way of contrast, both delicate and diffident. He loathed criticism and shrank from controversy. His life was hardly an exercise in vigour. He was under the best of circumstances a valetudinarian, and under the worst, a hypochondriac. Often both.
And yet his philosophy reveals currents that move against the grain of what seemed to be his personality. His experiences in Europe notwithstanding, he was an optimist by conviction and a theist by inclination; he took seriously speculations about the after-life; he was sceptical about the Darwinian theory of evolution. And he was a voluptuous Platonist, arguing with great boldness and ingenuity that the human intellect is capable of directly grasping pure mathematical abstractions. If during his life he chose to keep his philosophical views largely to himself, perhaps this is because he was persuaded that criticism would serve only to impede his tranquillity while doing nothing to advance his intellectual agenda.
The general theory of relativity is Einstein’s supreme creation, and it is to general relativity that Gödel made an unexpected contribution in 1948. The idea governing general relativity is not difficult to grasp. Space and time are fused within the theory, but, in truth, space and time are fused in ordinary life as well. We locate an event — the assassination of JFK, for example — both in terms of where it took place — Dallas, Texas — and when it took place — at roughly 1.30 EST on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963. Three numbers suffice to mark Dallas, Texas on any map that indicates height as well as longitude and latitude; one number is need to mark the time. Four numbers identify the event precisely.
If events are brief bursting episodes, processes in the most ordinary sense are sequences of such events, the events trailing one another like elephants marching trunk to tail. It is processes that comprise the fundamental objects treated in general relativity, where they are called world-lines, and the theory’s considerable mathematical apparatus is put in place to shed an analytic light on their behaviour.
We may leave the mathematical details to the mathematicians who cherish them. For all its complexity, the theory subordinates itself nicely to a number of homely metaphors. Imagine a marble placed on a mattress. Given a tap, the marble will move in a straight line. The mattress is, after all, flat. A heavy bowling ball is now placed on the mattress, its weight deforming the mattress by means of an obvious dimple. Given precisely the same tap, that marble flows downward toward the dimple, its path changing from a straight to a curved line. The weight of the bowling ball, the shape of the mattress and the path of the marble are obviously co-ordinated. The bowling ball deforms the medium of the mattress, and the deformed medium in turn controls the way in which the marble moves.
Those metaphoric crutches may now be withdrawn, marbles and mattresses replaced by the universe itself, with its stars, planets, wheeling galaxies and clouds of cosmic dust. The happy co-ordination just scouted reappears in this more general setting, no worse for wear. Massive objects deform the medium of space and time; and the deformed medium in turn influences the processes that take place within it, the field equation of general relativity co-ordinating that deformation with those processes.
Co-ordinate? Not quite. In its control over the cosmos, the field equation of general relativity sets the stage, but it does not determine the drama. The Russian mathematician Alexandr Friedmann provided the first realistic solution of Einstein’s field equation in 1922; and by the 1930s, his work had been assimilated into a general analytic structure — Friedmann-LeMaitre cosmology. It is this work that suggested the now familiar picture of an expanding universe, one moving explosively outward from a dense initial singularity.
But a universe proceeding from nothing to nowhere by means of an enthusiastic expansion — our universe, apparently — is but one possibility; and there are others. Some interpretations of the field equation are realised in a static but unstable universe, one that simply hangs around for all eternity if it manages to hang around at all. Early on, Einstein had committed his allegiance to a universe of this sort; he came to regard the universe of contemporary cosmology as inevitable, given the facts, but somewhat vulgar.
Until Gödel’s work, the universes available to cosmologists, although different in some respects, were all of them well-behaved and roly-poly, with the great imponderables of time, space and cause arranged with consideration for the common intellectual decencies.
Gödel succeeded in coaxing a new and certainly a flamboyant universe from the alembic of Einstein’s symbols. His analysis reflects the distinctive characteristic of all his work. It is highly original and logically coherent, the argument set out simply but with complete and convincing authority. A sense of superb taste prevails throughout. There is no show.
And it is odd. It is very and distinctly odd.
The concept of time now occupies centre stage. A number of philosophers are standing by. And what they are saying, those philosophers, is that change is an illusion. Things do not become, they have not been, and they will not be: they simply are. Human beings reach events in the future by displacing themselves in time just as they reach places on the earth by displacing themselves in space. They do not bring those places into being, nor those events. It is thus that time dwindles, and thus that time disappears, replaced by an entirely more arid notion, that of position along a temporal stream.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity, Gödel observed, was widely thought to support this view. Imagine a group of observers scattered carelessly throughout the cosmos. Each is able to organise the events of his life into a linear order; and as a result each is persuaded that his life consists of a series of nows, moving moments passing from the past to the present to the future. I might as well dismiss those observers before they do any real harm. This is how we see things. Now is after all now, it is not? Right now.
Apparently not. Simultaneity, special relativity revealed, depends on the speed at which we are moving with respect to one another. Moving at different speeds, the two of us, it is entirely possible that my now might be your past or your future.
It follows that what is becoming for me may have become or may become for you. But then Gödel asks, very reasonably, how something can become for me when it has already been for you? The idea is if not absurd then deeply unattractive. What is left when becoming is subtracted from the cosmic account is time — that remains. But change has disappeared. A philosophical conjecture has been ratified by a great physical theory.
This is a view that Gödel found congenial; in fact, it is view that Einstein also embraced, writing to the widow of his old friend Michael Besso, and writing with great poignancy, that “for us believing physicists, the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only an illusion ….”
And now the odd point. However much the illusory nature of time is suggested by special relativity, it is, in fact, slyly contravened by the dominant interpretation of general relativity. There is at least one universal system of time that provides a compelling standard of simultaneity throughout the cosmos, and that is the system provided by cosmology itself. The expansion of the universe is universal, space and time stretching the very fabric of creation. This means that there is a universal reference frame as well — it is the frame provided by the behaviour of matter. Physicists talk, after all, about the first three minutes. If this makes sense, it makes sense as well to talk of times after the first three minutes. It makes sense to talk of the time after the first three minutes everywhere in the universe, and if time has an origin, and a uniform measure, then we are again within the sounds of Newton’s universal clock. It is everywhere approximately fifteen billion years after the Big Bang, and it is that time now.
It is against this interpretation that Gödel turned his face, his work arising from his desire to reaffirm the very deepest insights of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
In an expanding universe, space and time rush outward in a hot gush from a primordial explosion. So, too, world-lines. They have no choice. There is a profound connection between the structure of an expanding universe and the nature of those processes taking place within it. Processes are, of course, nothing more than events following one another in a series, but it is useful to give them a visual incarnation, if only for purposes of illustration. Imagine those processes as strands in a great rope, a cosmic hawser. In a simply expanding universe, such as our own, the cosmic hawser is twist-free. The strands do not snake around one another, as they do in an ordinary rope. To say that they are twist-free is just to say that a cosmic knife could slice through them all at a right angle. It is this that makes for a global sense of simultaneity. It is now throughout the universe wherever the cosmic knife cuts the cosmic hawser, and it is now throughout the universe just because a twist-free cosmic hawser can be cut and cut completely by a cosmic knife.
The assumption of a simply expanding universe is now allowed to lapse. If not expanding, just what is the universe doing otherwise? It might, of course, be doing nothing whatsoever, as Einstein had originally expected; but then again it might be rotating in the void, turning serenely like a gigantic pinwheel, and it this idea that Gödel found compelling. In a universe of this sort, each observer sees things as if the whole universe were rotating about him. This strange assumption, Gödel demonstrated, satisfies the field equation of general relativity exactly.
Rotating universes may now be added to the catalogue of possible things.
A pause to collect ourselves. A rotating universe might suggest, at first glimpse, nothing more than the universe scouted by ancient astrologers, with observers clustered on the earth, and the celestial sphere turning around them. There is surely something to this analogy, a kind of historical wormhole snaking from one speculative enterprise to another; but the analogy is flawed inasmuch as it suggests that it is the galaxies alone that are rotating. Not so. Everything else goes along for the ride. If space and time can expand, as they do in Big Bang cosmology, they can also assume other geometrical properties. Which properties they assume depends on the behaviour of material objects, and if those objects are turning in circles, space and time must follow. This is precisely what happens in Gödel’s universe. As the galaxies rotate, they drag space and time with them, the medium in which all processes take place crumpling before and after those fugitive galaxies. An expanding universe blows up space and time; a rotating universe turns space and time around in spirals. The same idea is at work, but it works to profoundly different effect.
Rotating universes, most notably, permit travel in time. By moving in a large enough circle around an axis of rotation, an observer might in fact catch his own temporal tail, returning to his starting point some time earlier than his departure. Force is required, but not speeds in excess of the speed of light. The requisite paths are known as closed time-like curves. Their existence is guaranteed in Gödel’s rotating universe.
Needless to say, neither Gödel nor anyone else succeeded in making sense of the idea of time travel, whatever the unexpected possibilities his solutions suggest. The most obvious problem is well known. Were time travel possible, it would also be possible mischievously to influence the causal stream, say by assassinating one’s own grandfather or by otherwise causing upheavals in the flux and fleen of things. Star Trek notwithstanding, these practical problems are both bizarre and uninteresting. Gödel’s crucial point lies elsewhere.
In a universe containing closed time-like curves — Gödel’s universe -- the cosmic hawser is twisted, the strands looping over one another like snakes, and no cosmic cut of any cosmic knife could possibly cut them all. With the cosmic hawser irreparably twisted, time completely loses its significance as a form of change.
Inferences and assumptions now arrange themselves in a delicate array. Imagine a grand cosmological division, with rotating universe on the right, and non-rotating universes on the left. Gödel was able to demonstrate that on the left, where the non-rotating universes are collected, and the cosmic hawser is twist free, it is always possible to define an ever moving now and so a natural temporal order. On the right, where there are rotating universes, time undergoes its fateful dissolution and change disappears.
So much the worse, one might think, for rotating universes. Our universe is blessedly twist free, time a vehicle for change as it has always been.
But this, Gödel observed, is an accident of creation. The equations of general relativity are compatible with other possibilities. If in other possible universes no cosmic or global time is accessible, this might suggest that on the very deepest level, the features of time that we take for granted are also accidents of creation. It is this idea that Gödel found objectionable. If time exists, wherever it does exist, it must exist simply in virtue of “the particular way in which matter and its motions are arranged in the world.” A philosophical view leading to this conclusion, he added dryly, “can hardly be considered satisfactory.” Time and change demand a deeper explanation. And this physical theory does not provide.
They were close. This much we know, Gödel regarding the avuncular Einstein with appreciation, a sense of indebtedness for his robust psychological health.
And both men admired one another. This we know, too.
And yet curiously enough, the circumstances of their lives revealed countervailing currents. Einstein struggled to purge himself of the ties of family and friends, seeking solace not only in solitude but in a deliberate, carefully contrived release from the ordinary human bonds of family and affection. He had married as a young man, and divorced his first wife; he was hardly an inspired father. He lived within himself.
Like Einstein, Gödel found ordinary social intercourse an immense chore. He was notoriously reclusive, working at the Institute for Advanced Study in a darkened room, never attending other men’s lectures, solitary, obsessed, half-mad, consumed from within by the fires of an intellectual passion so powerful that by the end of his life they seemed quite literally to have consumed his frail flesh entirely. He died of ‘inanition,’ in the lapidary words of the Princeton health examiner: he had refused to eat.
And yet Gödel spent much of his adult life in state of matrimonial contentment. He had chosen his wife, Adele Porkert, by dropping from his own social class, scandalising his parents and his brother. She had been a dancer in a Viennese cabaret; and if she gave any thought to incompleteness, it must have been expressed by a typical Viennese expression of amused indulgence. But she was obviously a woman with a powerful will and great self-possession, and she made Gödel’s life possible by making it bearable.
Gödel spent the second half of his life absorbed by philosophy. In the end, he concluded that his efforts had been unavailing. “I did not,” he remarked to Hao Wang, “find in philosophy what I was looking for.” Much the same is true for Einstein. The great unified theory for which he had searched for more than thirty years eluded him.
Did Einstein and Gödel discuss issues such as this? I do not know. I suspect that the depth of their friendship made what diplomats often call frank discussions unnecessary. Gödel was skeptical of Einstein’s quest for a unified theory; and Einstein, we may be sure, must have regarded Gödel’s philosophical investigations with detachment, the deep and ineradicable melancholy in his personality making it impossible for him to regard optimism or theism with anything more than a sense of tolerant skepticism.
The issues between the men remain unsettled. But however they may be settled, neither Einstein nor Gödel found the arch that would have completed their lives.
But then again, none of us do.
For further reading please check out the following : http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=cTVs5e97DE4C&dq=einstein+and+G%C3%B6del+a+world+without+time&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=IUk9aVElEr&sig=UQ1fIr6qYwAws4AgMGHvemGpfJA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPP1,M1
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Suspension of disbelief or "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" is an aesthetic theory intended to characterize people's relationships to art. It was coined by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. It refers to the willingness of a person to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible. It also refers to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment.
The Seagull
(Russian: "Чайка" ("Chayka")), written in 1895, is the first of what are generally considered to be Anton Chekhov's four major plays. It centres on the romantic and artistic conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ingenue Nina, the fading leading lady Irina Arkadina, her son the experimental playwright Konstantin Treplyov, and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin.
Like the rest of Chekhov's full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In opposition to much of the melodramatic theatre of the 19th century, lurid actions (such as Treplyov's suicide attempts) are kept offstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly, a concept known as subtext.
The play has a strong intertextual relationship with Shakespeare's Hamlet. Arkadina and Treplyov quote lines from it before the play-within-a-play in the first act (and the play-within-a-play device is itself used in Hamlet). There are many allusions to Shakespearean plot details as well. For instance, Treplyov seeks to win his mother back from the usurping older man Trigorin much as Hamlet tries to win Queen Gertrude back from his uncle Claudius.
The opening night of the first production was a famous failure. Vera Komissarzhevskaya, playing Nina, was so intimidated by the hostility of the audience that she lost her voice.[1] Chekhov left the audience and spent the last two acts behind the scenes. When supporters wrote to him that the production later became a success, he assumed they were just trying to be kind.[1] When Constantin Stanislavski directed it in a later production for the Moscow Art Theatre, the play was a triumph.
Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski
(Russian: Константин Сергеевич Станиславский) (January 17 [O.S. 5 January] 1863 – August 7, 1938), was a Russian actor and theatre director.
Stanislavski's innovative contribution to modern European and American naturalistic acting has remained at the heart of mainstream western performance training for much of the last century. Building on the directorially-unified aesthetic and ensemble playing of the Meiningen company and the naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organized his realistic techniques into a coherent and usable system.[1] Thanks to its promotion and development by acting teachers who were former students and the many translations of his theoretical writings, Stanislavski's system acquired an unprecedented ability to cross cultural boundaries and developed an international reach, dominating debates about acting in the West.
Stanislavski treated theatre-making as a serious endeavour, requiring dedication, discipline and integrity, and the work of the actor as an artistic undertaking. His 'Method' resulted from a persistent struggle to remove the blocks he encountered. He developed a theorized praxis in which practice is used as a mode of inquiry and theory as a catalyst for creative development. Stanislavski believed that after seeing young actors at Aquinas College in Moscow he could see why theatre needed to change to a more disciplined endeavour.
Stanislavski's work was as important to the development of socialist realism in the USSR as it was to that of psychological realism in the United States.[2] Many actors routinely identify his 'system' with the American Method, although the latter's exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with Stanislavski's multivariant, holistic and psychophysical approach, which explores character and action both from the 'inside out' and the 'outside in'.[3] Stanislavski's work draws on a wide range of influences and ideas, including his study of the modernist and avant-garde developments of his time (naturalism, symbolism and Meyerhold's constructivism), Russian formalism, Yoga, Pavlovian behaviourist psychology, James-Lange (via Ribot) psychophysiology and the aesthetics of Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy. He described his approach as 'spiritual Realism'.In 1897 he co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, but the theatre started operating in 1898. The first production MAT produced was the critically acclaimed and previously censored Czar Fyodor by Alexei Tolstoy. Anton Chekhov's The Seagull was performed. Initially Chekhov did not grant Danchenko's request to perform the play because he wanted a more experienced troupe to perform it. Stanislavski beautified and innovated Chekov's script, and it created shock in the audiences. According to The Stanislavski Technique: Russia, by Mel Gordon, "his detailed realism transformed the most commonplace scene into an orchestrated display of minute effects... something modern had been born." The MAT had created what became known as psychological realism. Psychological realism embodied hidden conflicts within relationships, which exposed that which is so embedded in everyday life. Chekhov never liked the rendition of his play, but the rest of the audience, and the rest of the world, started to like the work of the MAT. It was then that the MAT became known as the House of Chekhov as they produced Chekhov's melancholic plays (though the playwright himself always insisted they were comedies) like Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The Moscow Art Theatre became a venerable institution and opened up classes in dance, voice and fencing. During the Russo-Japanese War, the group traveled to Germany and Eastern Europe, where they were so admired that one German playwright called them "artistic divinities." Parades were made in their honor, as the Europeans never saw such brilliant theatre. Upon returning to Russia, Stanislavski fell into an artistic crisis, where his acting and directing became erratic, as he professed his lack of fulfillment and inspiration. He went to Finland with his wife to vacation, and came back to give birth to his acting system that would change what it means to be an actor.The company under the direction of Stanislavski only toured the United States once in 1922-1923. Although they performed in Russian, the verisimilitude of the acting and the ensemble work impressed all who saw them, particularly a number of young actors starting their careers in the commercial theater in New York, among them Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg. When two former members of the company, Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya, began teaching the System at the American Laboratory Theater these performers jumped at the chance to study.
Stanislavski's 'system' focused on the development of artistic truth onstage by teaching actors to "live the part" during performance. Despite being primarily known in The United States for Realism, Stanislavski developed the system to be applied to all forms of theater, directing and producing melodrama, vaudeville, opera, etc. In order to create an ensemble of actors all working together as an artistic unit, he began organizing a series of studios in which young actors were trained in his system. At the First Studio of MAT, actors were instructed to use their own memories in order to naturally express emotions. Stanislavski soon observed that some of the actors using or abusing Emotional Memory were given to hysteria. Although he never disavowed Emotional Memory as an essential tool in the actor's kit, he began searching for less draining ways of accessing emotion, eventually emphasizing the actor's use of imagination and belief in the given circumstances of the text rather than her/his private and often painful memories.
Stanislavski's 'system' is a systematic approach to training actors. This system is at some point different from but not a rejection of what he states earlier in affective memory. At the beginning, Stanislavski proposed that actors study and experience subjective emotions and feelings and manifest them to audiences by physical and vocal means - Theatre language. While his System focused on creating truthful emotions and then embodying these, he later worked on The Method of Physical Actions. This was developed at the Opera Dramatic Studio from the early 30s, and worked like Emotion Memory in reverse. The focus was on the physical actions inspiring truthful emotion, and involved improvisation and discussion. The focus remained on reaching the subconscious through the conscious.
Stanislavski survived the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, with Lenin apparently intervening to protect him. In 1918, Stanislavski established the First Studio as a school for young actors and wrote several works: those available in English translation include: An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, Creating a Role, and the autobiography My Life in Art.
Stanislavski always thought of his system as if it were a table of contents for a large book which dealt with all aspects of acting. His final work, now known as The Method of Physical Actions (see Stanislavski's 'system'), is in no way a rejection of his early interest in sense and affective memory. At no time did he ever reject the notion of emotion memory; he simply found other means of accessing emotion, among them the absolute belief in given circumstances; the exercise of the imagination; and the use of physical action.
Wassily Kandinsky (Russian: Василий Кандинский, first name pronounced as [vassi:li]) (December 16 [O.S. December 4] 1866 – December 13, 1944) was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.
Kandinsky's conception of art
The artist as prophet
Writing that "music is the ultimate teacher," Kandinsky embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions. The first three survive only in black-and-white photographs taken by fellow artist and friend, Gabriele Münter. While studies, sketches, and improvisations exist (particularly of Composition II), a Nazi raid on the Bauhaus in the 1930s resulted in the confiscation of Kandinsky's first three Compositions. They were displayed in the State-sponsored exhibit "Degenerate Art" then destroyed along with works by Paul Klee, Franz Marc and other modern artists.
Influenced by Theosophy and the perception of a coming New Age, a common theme among Kandinsky's first seven Compositions is the Apocalypse, or the end of the world as we know it. Writing of the "artist as prophet" in his book, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky created paintings in the years immediately preceding World War I showing a coming cataclysm which would alter individual and social reality. Raised an Orthodox Christian, Kandinsky drew upon the Jewish and Christian stories of Noah's Ark, Jonah and the whale, Christ's Anastasis and Resurrection, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Revelation, various Russian folk tales, and the common mythological experiences of death and rebirth. Never attempting to picture any one of these stories as a narrative, he used their veiled imagery as symbols of the archetypes of death / rebirth and destruction / creation he felt were imminent to the pre-World War I world.
As he stated in Concerning the Spiritual In Art (see below), Kandinsky felt that an authentic artist creating art from "an internal necessity" inhabits the tip of an upward moving triangle. This progressing triangle is penetrating and proceeding into tomorrow. Accordingly, what was odd or inconceivable yesterday is commonplace today; what is avant garde (and only understood by the few) today is standard tomorrow. The modern artist/prophet stands lonely at the tip of this triangle making new discoveries and ushering in tomorrow's reality. Kandinsky had become aware of recent developments in sciences, as well as the advances of modern artists who had contributed to radically new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.
Composition IV and subsequent paintings are primarily concerned with evoking a spiritual resonance in viewer and artist. As in his painting of the apocalypse by water (Composition VI), Kandinsky puts the viewer in the situation of experiencing these epic myths by translating them into contemporary terms along with requisite senses of desperation, flurry, urgency, and confusion. This spiritual communion of viewer-painting-artist/prophet is ineffable but may be described to the limits of words and images.
Artistic and spiritual theoretician
As the Der Blaue Reiter Almanac essays and theorizing with composer Arnold Schoenberg indicate, Kandinsky also expressed this communion between artist and viewer as being simultaneously available to the various sense faculties as well as to the intellect (synesthesia). Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, for examples, yellow is the color of middle-C on a piano, a brassy trumpet blast; black is the color of closure and the ends of things; and that combinations and associations of colors produce vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano. Kandinsky also developed an intricate theory of geometric figures and their relationships, claiming, for example, that the circle is the most peaceful shape and represents the human soul. These theories are set forth in Point and Line to Plane (see below).
During the months of studies Kandinsky made in preparation for Composition IV he became exhausted while working on a painting and went for a walk. In the meantime, Gabriele Münter tidied his studio and inadvertently turned his canvas on its side. Upon returning and seeing the canvas—yet not identifying it—Kandinsky fell to his knees and wept, saying it was the most beautiful painting he had seen. He had been liberated from attachment to the object. As when he first viewed Monet's Haystacks, the experience would change his life and the history of Western art.
In another event with Münter during the Bavarian Abstract Expressionist years, Kandinsky was working on his Composition VI. From nearly six months of study and preparation, he had intended the work to evoke a flood, baptism, destruction, and rebirth simultaneously. After outlining the work on a mural-sized wood panel, he became blocked and could not go on. Münter told him that he was trapped in his intellect and not reaching the true subject of the picture. She suggested he simply repeat the word "uberflut" ("deluge" or "flood") and focus on its sound rather than its meaning. Repeating this word like a mantra, Kandinsky painted and completed the monumental work in only a three-day span.
The analysis made by Kandinsky on forms and on colours doesn't result from simple arbitrary ideas associations, but from the inner experience of the painter who has passed years creating abstract paintings of an incredible sensorial richness, working on forms and with colors, observing for a long time and tirelessly his own paintings and those of other artists, noting simply their subjective effect on the very high sensibility to colors of his artist and poet soul.
So it is a purely subjective form of experience that everyone can do and repeat taking the time to look at his paintings and letting acting the forms and the colors on his own living sensibility. These are not scientific and objective observations, but inner observations radically subjective and purely phenomenological which is a matter of what the French philosopher Michel Henry calls the absolute subjectivity or the absolute phenomenological life.
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Originally published in 1911, Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of humanity to a large triangle similar to a pyramid; the artist has the task and the mission of leading others to the top by the exercise of his talent. The point of the Triangle is constituted only by some individuals who bring the sublime bread to men. It is a spiritual triangle which moves forward and rises slowly, even if it sometimes remains immobile. During decadent periods, souls fall to the bottom of the Triangle and men only search for the external success and ignore purely spiritual forces.
When we look at colors on the painter's palette, a double effect happens: a purely physical effect on the eye, charmed by the beauty of colors firstly, which provokes a joyful impression as when we eat a delicacy. But this effect can be much deeper and cause an emotion and a vibration of the soul, or an inner resonance which is a purely spiritual effect, by which the color touches the soul.
The inner necessity is for Kandinsky the principle of the art and the foundation of forms and colors' harmony. He defines it as the principle of the efficient contact of the form with the human soul. Every form is the delimitation of a surface by another one; it possesses an inner content which is the effect it produces on the one who looks at it attentively. This inner necessity is the right of the artist to an unlimited freedom, but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not founded on such a necessity. The art work is born from the inner necessity of the artist in a mysterious, enigmatic and mystic way, and then it acquires an autonomous life; it becomes an independent subject animated by a spiritual breath.
The first obvious properties we can see when we look at isolated color and let it act alone; it is on one side the warmth or the coldness of the colored tone, and on the other side the clarity or the obscurity of the tone.
The warmth is a tendency to yellow, the coldness a tendency to blue. The yellow and the blue form the first big contrast, which is dynamic. The yellow possesses an eccentric movement and the blue a concentric movement, a yellow surface seems to get closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. The yellow is the typically terrestrial color whose violence can be painful and aggressive. The blue is the typically celestial color which evokes a deep calm. The mixing of blue with yellow gives the total immobility and the calm, the green.
Clarity is a tendency to the white and obscurity a tendency to the black. The white and the black form the second big contrast, which is static. The white acts like a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities. The black is a nothingness without possibility, it is an eternal silence without hope, it corresponds to death. That’s why any other color resonates so strongly on its neighbors. The mixing of white with black leads to gray, which possesses no active force and whose affective tonality is near that of green. The gray corresponds to immobility without hope; it tends to despair when it becomes dark and regains little hope when it lightens.
The red is a warmth color, very living, lively and agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a movement in oneself. Mixed with black, it leads to brown which is a hard color. Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and gives the orange which possesses an irradiating movement on the surroundings. Mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give the purple, which is cooled red. The red and the green form the third big contrast, the orange and the purple the fourth one.
Kandinsky analyses in his writings the geometrical elements which compose every painting, namely the point and the line, as well as the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints and which he calls the basic plane or BP. He doesn’t analyze them on an objective and exterior point of view, but on the point of view of their inner effect on the living subjectivity of the observer who looks at them and lets them act on his sensibility.
The point is in practice a small stain of color put by the artist on the canvas. So the point used by the painter is not a geometric point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it possesses a certain extension, a form and a color. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, like a star or even more complex. The point is the most concise form, but according to its placement on the basic plane it will take a different tonality. It can be alone and isolated or put in resonance with other points or lines.
The line is the product of a force, it is a point on which a living force has been applied in a given direction, the force applied on the pencil or on the paint brush by the hand of the artist. The produced linear forms can be of several types: a straight line which results from a unique force applied in a single direction, an angular line which results from the alternation of two forces with different directions, or a curved or wave-like line produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. A plane can be obtained by condensation, from a line rotated around one of its ends.
The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: the horizontal line corresponds to the ground on which man rests and moves, to flatness, it possesses a dark and cold affective tonality similar with black or blue, while the vertical line corresponds to height which offers no support, it possesses a luminous and warm tonality close from white and yellow. A diagonal possesses by consequence a more or less warm or cold tonality according to its inclination according to the horizontal and to the vertical.
A force which deploys itself without obstacle as the one which produces a straight line corresponds to lyricism, while several forces which confront or annoy each other form a drama. The angle formed by the angular line possesses as well an inner sonority which is warm and close to yellow for an acute angle (triangle), cold and similar to blue for an obtuse angle (circle) and similar to red for a right angle (square).
The basic plane is in general rectangular or square, thus it is composed of horizontals and verticals lines which delimit it and define it as an autonomous being which will serve as support to the painting, communicating its affective tonality. This tonality is determined by the relative importance of horizontal and vertical lines, the horizontals giving a calm and cold tonality to the basic plane, while the verticals give it a calm and warm tonality. The artist possesses the intuition of this inner effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality he wants to give to his work. Kandinsky even considers the basic plane as a living being that the artist "fertilizes" and of which he feels the "breathing".
Every part of the basic plane possesses a proper affective coloration which influences the tonality of the pictorial elements that will be drawn on it, and which contributes to the richness of the composition which results from their juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds to the looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes the condensation and heaviness. The work of the painter is to listen and to know these effects in order to produce paintings which are not just the effect of a random process, but the fruit of an authentic work and the result of an effort toward the inner beauty.
Music + Color = multisensory aesthetic experience
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Скря́бин, Aleksandr Nikolaevič Skrjabin; sometimes transliterated as Skriabin, Skryabin, or Scriabine) (6 January 1872 [O.S. 25 December 1871]–27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist who developed a highly lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language. Driven by a poetic, philosophical and aesthetic vision that bordered on the mystical, he can be considered the primary figure of Russian Symbolism in music.
Influence of color
Though these works are often considered to be influenced by Scriabin's synesthesia, a condition wherein one experiences sensation in one sense in response to stimulus in another, it is doubted that Alexander Scriabin actually experienced this.[10][11] His colour system, unlike most synesthetic experience, lines up with the circle of fifths: it was a thought-out system based on Sir Isaac Newton's Opticks. Note that Scriabin did not, as far as his theory is concerned, recognize a difference between a major and a minor tonality of the same name (for example: c-minor and C-Major). Indeed, influenced also by the doctrines of Theosophy, he developed his system of Synesthesia toward what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas that was to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss.
In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin's association of colour and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colors; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colours involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight supported their view: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny."
While Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, they are among his most famous, and some are frequently performed. They include three symphonies, a piano concerto (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a "clavier à lumières", also known as the Luce (Italian for "Light"), which was a colour organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's symphony. It was played like a piano, but projected coloured light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece (including the premiere) have not included this light element, although a performance in New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen. It has erroneously been claimed that this performance used the colour-organ invented by English painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction personally supervised and built in New York specifically for the performance by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.
Scriabin's original colour keyboard, with its associated turntable of coloured lamps, is preserved in his apartment near the Arbat in Moscow, which is now a museum dedicated to his life and works.
Man Takes Time part 2 (Muybridge) (1877)
Eadweard J. Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was an English photographer, known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the celluloid film strip that is still used today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif
Man Takes Time part 1 (Edison) (1877)
First phonograph
Thomas Alva Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone.[4] He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877, and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder using an up-down ("hill-and-dale") motion of the stylus.[5] The tinfoil sheet was wrapped around a grooved cylinder, and the sound was recorded as indentations into the foil. Edison's early patents show that he also considered the idea that sound could be recorded as a spiral onto a disc, but Edison concentrated his efforts on cylinders, since the groove on the outside of a rotating cylinder provides a constant velocity to the stylus in the groove, which Edison considered more "scientifically correct". Edison's patent specified that the audio recording was embossed, and it was not until 1886 that vertically modulated engraved recordings using wax coated cylinders were patented by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. They named their version the Graphophone. Emile Berliner patented his Gramophone in 1887. The Gramophone involved a system of recording using a lateral (back and forth) movement of the stylus as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc coated with a compound of beeswax in a solution of benzine. The zinc disc was immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched the groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played.
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