Fingerspitzengefühl!

Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, c. 1818.

Caspar David Friedrich (German)

George Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte (1884-6)

Wilhelm Roentgen, 1895

Eadweard Muybridge1884-1885

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New York in February 1913 at the historic Armory Show of contemporary art, where perplexed Americans saw it as representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing at their expense. The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its seemingly mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual and time-honored. The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers. -- Philadelphia Museum of Art

Miller's point is that both Einstein and Picasso discarded the empiricist view--"what you see is what you get"--in favor of the realist-intellectualist view--thinking, not seeing, leads to the truth. The purpose of science is not to provide the most economical representation of the facts (as Ernst Mach claimed), and the purpose of art is not to provide the most accurate representation of what we can see (Why compete with photography?). The purpose of both science and art is to discover the reality that lies hidden behind the appearances.

Stephen G. Brush, on Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, by Arthur I. Miller Basic Books (Perseus), New York, 2001.

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (June-July 1907). The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931)

M.C. Escher, Relativity (1953)

Einsteinturm, Potsdam(Erich Mendelsohn, architect)

On the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1905)

Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content? (1905)

Investigations on the theory of Brownian movement (1905)

On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light (1905)

“When the Einstein centenary was celebrated in 1979 the speakers at all of these great events spoke about physics only as theory. It seemed odd to me that somebody like Einstein, who had begun as a patent officer and who had been profoundly interested in experiments, had left such a thoroughly abstract image of himself… For quite a number of years I have been guided in my work by the odd confrontation of abstract ideas and extremely concrete objects. Science history, sociology, and epistemology are for me very connected, and the kind of work that I do in the history of science is always propelled and illuminated through philosophical questions…”

“The Einstein we know today is mostly based on Einstein’s later years, when he prided himself on his alienation from practically everything sociable and human, projecting an image of himself as a distracted, other-worldly character. We remember that Einstein who said that the best thing for a theoretical physicist would be to tend a lighthouse in quiet isolation from the world in order to be able to think pure thoughts. We have this picture of the theoretical physicist, and project it backwards to Einstein’s miraculous year, 1905. It is easy enough to think of him as working a day job in a patent office merely to keep body and soul together, while in actuality his real work was purely cerebral. Such a split existence never made sense to me; I wondered how his work in the details of machines and objects might connect to these abstract ideas, and began thinking about how relativity itself might have been lodged in the time, place, and machinery in which it was created.”

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

-- Albert Einstein, “Why socialism?” (1949)

The armament industry is indeed one of the greatest dangers that beset mankind. It is the hidden evil power behind the nationalism which is rampant everywhere ...

-- Albert Einstein, 1934