For the Love of Physics (41 page)

CHAPTER 15

Ways of Seeing

M
ost high school and college students hate taking physics because it is usually taught as a complicated set of mathematical formulas. That is not the approach I use at MIT, and it is not the approach I use in this book. I present physics as a way of seeing our world, revealing territories that would otherwise be hidden to us—from the tiniest subatomic particles to the vastness of our universe. Physics allows us to see the invisible forces at play all around us, from gravity to electromagnetism, and to be on the alert not only for where and when we’ll find rainbows, but also halos, fogbows, and glories, and maybe even glassbows.

Each pioneering physicist changed the way we look at the world. After Newton, we could understand and predict the movements of the entire solar system, and we had the mathematics—calculus—to do so. After Newton, no one could claim that sunlight was not made up of colors, or that rainbows came from anything but sunlight refracting and reflecting in raindrops. After Maxwell, electricity and magnetism were forever linked: it was even hard for me to separate them into different chapters in this book.

This is why I see a fascinating relationship between physics and art; pioneering art is also a new way of seeing, a new way of looking at the world. You might be surprised to learn that for much of my life I’ve been almost as obsessed with modern art as I have been with physics; I have a love relationship with both! I’ve already mentioned my large collection of Fiestaware. I’ve also collected more than a hundred works of art—paintings, collages, sculptures, rugs, chairs, tables, puppets, masks—since the mid-sixties, and I no longer have enough wall or floor space in my home to display them all.

In my office at MIT, physics dominates, though I have two great works of art on loan from the university. But at home I probably only have about a dozen physics books—and about 250 art books. I was fortunate in being initiated into a love of art early.

My parents collected art, though they knew very little about it intellectually. They simply went by what they liked, which can lead down some blind alleys. Sometimes they picked some great works, and sometimes some not so great, or at least so it appears with the benefit of hindsight. One painting that made a strong impression on me is a portrait of my father, which I now have hanging over my fireplace in Cambridge. It is really very striking. My father was a real character—and like me, he was very opinionated. The artist, who knew him very well, caught him superbly, from the waist up, with his large, bald, oblong head sitting between his powerful square shoulders, his small mouth set in a self-satisfied smile. But it’s his glasses that truly stand out: thick, black, outlining invisible eyes, they follow you around the room, while his left eyebrow arches quizzically over the frame. That was his entire personality: penetrating.

My father took me to art galleries and museums when I was in high school, and it was then that I really began to fall in love with art, as it taught me new ways of seeing. I loved that in galleries and museums, as opposed to school, you proceed according to your own interests, stopping when you wish, staying as long as you like, moving on when it suits you. You develop your own relationship to art. I soon started going to
museums on my own, and before long, I had acquired a bit of knowledge. I plunged into van Gogh. (You know his name is really pronounced
van Chocch
—it’s all but unpronounceable if you’re not Dutch, two gutturals barely separated by a short O sound.) I ended up giving a lecture about van Gogh to my class when I was fifteen. I would also take my friends on tours to museums sometimes. So it was really art that got me into teaching.

This is when I first learned what a wonderful feeling it is to teach others—of any age—to expand their minds into new realms. It’s a real shame that art can seem as obscure and difficult as so much of physics does to so many who had poor physics teachers. This is one reason that for the past eight years I’ve enjoyed putting an art quiz on my MIT bulletin board every week—an image I print off the web, with the question “Who is the artist?” I give prizes—some very nice art books—to the three contestants who have the most correct answers over the course of the year. Some regulars spend hours scouring the web and in doing so, they learn about art! I had so much fun with the weekly quiz that I’ve now put up a biweekly one on my Facebook page. You can try it yourself if you like.

I’ve also been lucky enough to have had some wonderful chances to collaborate with some amazing, cutting-edge artists in my life. In the late 1960s the German “sky artist” Otto Piene came to MIT as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and later ended up directing it for two decades. Because I had already been flying some of my giant balloons by then, I got to help Otto make some of his sky art. The very first project we worked on together was called the
Light Line Experiment
, and consisted of four 250-foot-long polyethylene tubes filled with helium that, when held down at each end, made elegant arcs in the spring breezes at the MIT athletic fields. We tied all four together to make a thousand-foot-long balloon and let one end float up into the sky. At night we brought out spotlights that lit up parts of the snakelike balloons as they twisted and waved in the most amazing, constantly changing shapes, hundreds of feet in the air. It was fabulous!

My job in these projects was usually technical: figuring out whether Otto’s ideas for the sizes and shapes of the balloons would be feasible. How thick should the polyethylene be, for example? We wanted it to be light enough to rise, but strong enough to stand up under windy conditions. At a 1974 event in Aspen, Colorado, we hung multifaceted glass beads from the tether lines of a “light tent.” I made many calculations regarding the different balloon sizes and bead weights in order to get to a workable solution in terms of physics and aesthetics. I loved doing the physics to make Otto’s artistic ideas a reality.

I got really involved with the immense, five-color
Rainbow
balloon he designed for the closing ceremonies of the 1972 Olympics in Munich. We of course had no idea that the Olympics would end so disastrously, with the massacre of the Israeli athletes, so our 1,500-foot
Rainbow
, which arched nearly five hundred feet high over the Olympic sea, became a symbol of hope in the face of catastrophe. A picture of the
Rainbow
balloon can be seen in the insert. When I began flying balloons to look at the universe, it never occurred to me that I could be involved in such projects.

Otto introduced me to the Dutch artist Peter Struycken, whose art I knew well because my parents had collected his works in the Netherlands. Otto called me up one day at MIT and said, “There’s this Dutch artist in my office; would you like to meet him?” People always assume that if we’re from the same little country we’d like to chat, but more often than not, I don’t want to. I told Otto, “Why should I, what’s his name?” When Otto said “Peter Struycken,” of course I agreed, but in order to play it safe, I told Otto that I could only meet for half an hour (which was not true). So Peter came over to my office; we talked for almost five hours (yes, five hours!) and I invited him for oysters at Legal Sea Foods afterward! We clicked right from the start, and Peter became one of my closest friends for more than twenty years. This visit changed my life forever!

During that first discussion I was able to make Peter “see” why his major problem/question—“When is something different from something
else?”—all depends on one’s definition of difference. For some, a square may be different from a triangle and different from a circle. However, if you define geometric lines that close onto themselves as the same—well, then these three shapes are all the same.

Peter showed me a dozen computer drawings, all made with the same program, and he said, “They are all the same.” To me they looked all very different. It all depends on one’s definition of “the same.” I added that if they were all the same to him, perhaps he would like to leave me one. He did and he wrote on it, in Dutch,
“Met dank voor een gesprek”
(literally, “With thanks for a discussion”). This was typical Peter: very very low key. Frankly, of the many Struyckens I have, this small drawing is my very favorite.

Peter had found in me a physicist who was not only very interested in art, but who could help him with his work. He is one of the world’s pioneers in computer art. In 1979 Peter (with Lien and Daniel Dekkers) came for a year to MIT, and we started working together very closely. We met almost daily, and I had dinner at his place two or three times a week. Before Peter I “looked” at art—Peter made me “see” art.

Without him, I think I never would have learned to focus on pioneering works, to see how they can fundamentally transform our ways of seeing the world. I learned that art is not only, or even mostly, about beauty; it is about discovery, and this is where art and physics come together for me.

From that time on, I began to look at art very differently. What I “liked” was no longer important to me. What counted was the artistic quality, the new way of looking at the world, and that can only be appreciated if you really know something about art. I began to look closely at the years that works were made. Malevich’s pioneering works of art from 1915 to 1920 are fascinating. Similar paintings made by others in the 1930s are of no interest to me. “Art is either plagiarism or revolution,” said Paul Gauguin, with typical Gauguin arrogance, but there is some truth in it.

I was fascinated by the evolution that led to pioneering works. As an
example, soon I was able to accurately tell the year that a Mondrian was made—his development between 1900 and 1925 was staggering—and my daughter Pauline can do that now too. Over the years I have noticed more than once that museums sometimes list the wrong date for a painting. When I point this out (as I always do), curators are sometimes embarrassed, but they always change it.

I worked with Peter on a dozen of his ideas. Our first project was “16th Space,” art in sixteen dimensions (we beat string theory with its eleven dimensions). I also recall Peter’s
Shift
series. He had developed a mathematical underpinning to a computer program that generated very complex and interesting art. But because he didn’t know much math, his equations were bizarre—really ridiculous. He wanted the math to be beautiful but didn’t know how to do it.

I was able to come up with a solution, not so complicated in physics at all: traveling waves in three dimensions. You can set the wavelength; you can determine the speed of the waves; and you can indicate their directions. And if you want three waves going through one another, you can do that. You start with a beginning condition and then you let the waves go through one another and add them up. This produces very interesting interference patterns.

The underlying math was beautiful, and that was very important for Peter. I don’t mean to boast—he would tell you the same thing. This is the role that I have mostly played in his life: to show him how to make things mathematically beautiful and easy to understand. He very kindly always let me choose one work of art from each series. Lucky me, I have about thirteen Struyckens!

As a result of my collaboration with Peter, I was invited by the director of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam to give the first Mondrian Lecture in 1979 under the vast dome of Amsterdam’s Koepelkerk. It was packed; there were about nine hundred people in my audience. This very prestigious lecture is now given every other year. The lecturer in 1981 was Umberto Eco, Donald Judd in 1993, Rem Koolhaas in 1995, and Charles Jencks in 2010.

My collaborations with Otto and Peter have not been my only involvement in making art; I once tried (in jest) to make a bit of conceptual art myself. When I gave my lecture “Looking at 20th-Century Art Through the Eyes of a Physicist” (
http://mitworld.mit.edu/speaker/view/55
), I explained that at home I have about a dozen books on physics but at least two hundred fifty on art, so the ratio is about twenty to one. I placed ten art books on the desk and invited the audience to look through them at the intermission. In order to keep the proper balance, I announced, I’d brought half a book on physics. That morning I had sliced a physics text in two, right down the middle of the spine. So I held it up, pointing out that I’d cut it very carefully—it was really half a book. “For those of you uninterested in art,” I said—dropping it loudly on the table—“here you are!” I’m afraid no one got it.

If we look back at the days of Renaissance art up to the present, then there is a clear trend. The artists are gradually removing the constraints that were put on them by prevailing traditions: constraints of subject matter, of form, of materials, of perspective, of technique, and of color. By the end of the nineteenth century, artists completely abandoned the idea of art as a representation of the natural world.

The truth is that we now find many of these pioneering works magnificent, but the intention of the artists was quite something else. They wanted to introduce a new way of looking at the world. Many of the works that we admire today as iconic and beautiful creations—van Gogh’s
Starry Night
, for example, or Matisse’s
The Green Stripe
(a portrait of his wife) received ridicule and hostility at the time. Today’s beloved Impressionists—Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir—among the most popular artists in any museum today, also faced derision when they began showing their paintings.