Introduction: Physics of Aesthetics: A Meeting of Science, Art and Thought in Barcelona

Leonardo

Introduction: Physics of Aesthetics: A Meeting of Science, Art and Thought in BarcelonaAuthor(s): Josep Perelló and Vicenç AltaióSource: Leonardo, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2008), pp. 232-237, 220Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20206586 .

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Roger Malina

P?re Castells

Isona Passola

Perejaume

Rainer Blatt

Clara

Segura

Enric Casasses

Isabel de Pedro

Ricard V. Sol?

Liba Villavecchia

Jes?s Gald?n

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

Llu?s Reales

Mart? Guix?

Sara P?rez

James K. Gimzewski

Benedetta

Tagliabue

Luis Alvarez Gaum?

?ngels Margarit

f?sica de I*est?tica encontre internacional noves fronteres de la ciencia, l'art i el pensament >

1. horitzons de l'univers 2. materia dominada 3. formes cTatzar i complexitat La Pedrera, dies 6 i 7 de setembre de 2005_ Auditori Caixa Catalunya LA PEDRERA Inscnpci? gratuita: Reconegut amb ^ cr?dit de Itiure elecci? per la CACG

Pg.de Gracia, 92 fisicadele$tetica.cultura#gencat.net deiaUB. 08008 BARCELONA info: http://cultura.gencat.net/krtu/act?vitats,htm



SECTION INTRODUCTION oHm

Physics of Aesthetics: I

A Meeting of Science, Art jj

and Thought in Barcelona

Josep Perell? and

Vicen? Altai?

AR <? T B A f T ^^^^^H

I he Physics of Aesthetics conference in Barcelona intro duced the paradigms of the liveliest aspects of physics.

One hundred years after Ein stein's annus mirabilis, physics continues making progress, and the authors participated with internationally well-known scientists in drawing the outline of its more attractive face. Universal questions naturally arose, relating to the limits of our perception, the design of matter and the narrative of the

complexity surrounding us.

Local non-scientist personalities helped to distill aesthetics from the contemporary tendencies of this scientific discipline.

T -J^he year 2005 was declared World Physics Year

at the suggestion of UNESCO. The declaration commemo

rated the centennial of Albert Einstein's creative annus

mirabilis, which overturned most of the creed of physics. Ein

stein represents better than anyone the end of classical physics and openness to new views. This was the starting point of the

international conference "New Frontiers of Science, Art and

Thought: Physics of Aesthetics," which took place 6-7 Sep tember 2005 at La Pedrera in Barcelona (see Article Fron

tispiece). This introduction aims to briefly summarize the

event. A selection of the scientific lectures given at the con

ference is presented in this special section.

We begin by recalling Jules Henri Poincar?, a physicist and mathematician who appears in the family tree of physics as the

father of the theory of chaos and grandfather of relativity. More than 100 years ago, chaos theory determined the im

possibility of predicting movement in systems as simple as two

coupled pendulums despite perfect knowledge of the forces

governing their dynamics. As a result of the theory of relativ

ity, the observer was included as a part of scientific experiment and observation. Both approaches, that proceeding from

chaos theory and that from relativity, were in conflict with the

cosmogony of the physics of the time. Actually, they continue

to clash head on with the views of a non-expert audience that

can recognize only the physics of Newton and Faraday. Given this change in paradigm, Poincar? devoted a great

deal of his time to thinking about the creativity and method

ology of scientific work: "It is by logic we prove, it is by intu

ition that we invent"; "Logic, therefore, remains barren unless

fertilised by intuition" [1]. Furthermore: "Facts do not speak";

"Experience suggests scientific theories, but it does not justify

them"; "Experience cannot falsify a theory by itself; the the

ory often corrects the experience" [2]. Poincar? believed that

scientific laws are conventions and thought that the coexis

tence of contradictory theories was a possibility. The human

factor is as determinative as the so-called "blessed objectivity"

of science, if not more so. Scientific

thought is too often shown as some

thing certain; the scientific spirit ac

tually sways across the ground of

doubt and uncertainty. Each annual meeting of "New

Frontiers of Science, Art and

Thought" is intended to observe a

science alive, under construction, |

provisional. In 2005 we explored the link between aesthetics and physics with this same pur

pose. Certainly, the meaning of "aesthetics" shifts depending on who regards it and how it is regarded. To a physicist, aes

thetics usually means beauty, elegance, simplicity, order and

symmetry. On the contrary, the aesthetics of ugliness and anti

art has been a rule from the time of the historical avant-garde at the turn of the 20th century up to the art of today.

The Irrigation of the Void The romantic image of the explorer walking through the jun

gle can be used as a metaphor. The most basic aesthetic ex

perience emerges when the scientist marvels at some exotic

landscape. It is the same sensation as that of an observer at the

turn of the 20th century looking at the strange deep-sea jelly fish that Ernst Haeckel drew, or of a Westerner staring at Maria

Fortuny's canvases of idyllic life in Morocco. Such a sight di

lates the pupils and strikes violently into the retina, trying to

surprise. Its motive power is fascination with the unknown,

the mystery, as Einstein would say.

Today, aesthetic images?which used to picture an exotic

landscape, empty of everydayness in the explorer's eye?reach us through mechanized apophyses that extend our body in or

der to reach certain points that are unachievable for human

beings. The investigator explores the limits of the universe

with the eyes of the Hubble telescope, tickles an atom with a

needle or cruelly guts its nucleus to find its elementary parti cles. Such experiences regenerate realism, widen our imagi nation and breathe life into an invisible existence.

The first part of the symposium dealt with "Horizons of the

Universe." The plural form is absolutely necessary because of

the need to talk about the limits of small things (the micro) as well as those of big things (the macro). Both edges have

something in common. Extremes meet. Roger Malina dis

cussed the macro. Malina plays an active part in astronomy's

Josep Perell? (research scientist, writer), Departament de F?sica Fonamental, Universit?t de Barcelona, Diagonal, 647, Barcelona E-08028, Spain. E-mail: <[email protected]>.

Vicen? Altai? (poet, essayist, art critic, writer), KRTU?Departament de Cultura i Mitjans de Comunicado, Generalit?t de Catalunya, Carrer Portal de Santa Madrona, 6-8, Barcelona E-08001, Spain. E-mail: <[email protected]>.

Article Frontispiece. Estela Robles, poster for the Physics of Aes thetics conference. (? Estela Robles) The image is a modification of a typical scientific representation of the World Wide Web.

?2008ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 232-237,2008 233



I second golden age, after Galileo and his

optical telescope. He is taking part in sev

eral research programs to detect the uni

verse's dark matter and dark energy. These suggestively named entities are the

major ingredients of the cosmos, but sci

entists know almost nothing about them.

New telescopes focus not upon the visi

ble part of the light spectrum but on light from galaxies and quasars at a position on the spectrum that the human eye can

not retain. This is precisely where new

physics is generating newer and more fas

cinating portraits of the cosmos. Malina

also asserted that up to 95% of the con

tent of our universe is still a mystery to

scientists today, a fact that should en

courage scientists to accept artists' con

tribution to apprehending the aesthetic

dimensions of the cosmos. Malina ended

with the famous sentence, "Make visible

the invisible," stated by an artist a few

decades ago but perfectly applicable to

the state of the art of today's astronomy and cosmology.

Let us turn now 180?, to the other end

of our sensory ability. On the border be

tween France and Switzerland, under

ground, is one of the greatest doors to

the universe of minuteness. The Euro

pean Laboratory for Particle Physics

(CERN) undresses atomic nuclei and di

vides them into even more fundamental

pieces. Luis Alvarez Gaum?, head of the

Theoretical Division, gave further clues,

different from the astronomer's, to the

mysteries of matter and universe. The

theoretical scientist, in this case, insisted

on the abstract notion of aesthetics in sci

ence through mathematical formulae.

The second part of the conference, "Dominated Matter," led us to introspec tion regarding small things, even if not

so minuscule as those detected at CERN.

New observational tools let us visualize a

landscape consisting of a few atoms. Laws

related to quantum physics that are con

trary to our intuition rule this new nano

world. Nanoscientists obtain spectacular

images, but they also compel us to ask

ourselves what is considered real and ma

terial. In any case, the human being is

able to control the position and state of

an atom. Technology plays a decisive role, so much so that it is responsible for the

boost of basic science on an atomic scale.

Nanotechnology opens the doors to a fu

ture that will also affect our most tangi ble reality, drastically modifying our lives

and environment within a period of 50

years. Design ? la carte with any material

will affect areas as different as fashion and

surgery. In this context, there are two

outstanding lines of investigation. On the

one hand, the conference featured the

world of new materials, where physics comes closer to chemistry and biology, here represented by James Gimzewski,

who worked at IBM in the 1980s in gen

erating new technologies. On the other hand there is quantum

computation, as discussed by Rainer

Blatt, of a very important laboratory on

the subject located in Innsbruck, Austria.

Blatt told us about technological efforts

based on qubits and handling isolated

ions. Ions quiver in unison, impelled by the dream of creating quantum comput ers. Blatt's notion of aesthetics can be syn thesized in one word: symmetry. This

elegant property is a fundamental ingre dient in many subjects of physics, but it

plays a key role in quantum mechanics.

The most exciting issue discussed was

quantum teleportation, in which data

transmission takes advantage of the sym

metry properties of quantum states of

matter situated at very distant points. Readers are invited to visit Blatt's web site

[3] for further details on his research. At

a more general level, Blatt reminded us

that symmetry has allowed science to

identify and unveil patterns in nature. In

this sense, science can anticipate the re

sults of observations of phenomena and

infer knowledge from certain fields to

other, much less-known areas.

The above-mentioned extremes con

cern inner matter, with or without im

ages. Our avid expansion toward the

limits of our perception has been dis

tracting the attention of physics with top ics undoubtedly basic but also insufficient

to produce a complete picture of the

world. We humans still should stand in

front of the mirror and place live systems such as ourselves before the camera's

lens. It is true that quantum physics and

relativity have already included us in the

picture as observers that affect the out

comes of experiments. The symposium,

however, was even more daring. The last

part of this meeting, "Forms of Random

ness and Complexity," brought us back to

our own world: a human scale ruled by

complexity and fate. The scene contains

a great amount of interacting bodies and

escapes from the descriptions of physics that were mentioned in the previous lec

tures. Even so, physics in its irrepressible ambition feels itself capable of ap

proaching these topics, typically the do

main of social sciences and humanities.

The Internet would present the most im

portant exemplar of the so-called theory of complexity. We are speaking of systems that are not globally designed, systems that have emerged spontaneously, in a

self-organized manner, and have created

an extremely efficient fractal network. Ri

card V. Sol?, of the Laboratory of Com

plex Systems in Barcelona, showed us the

transdisciplinary view offered by complex networks when they treat, in a similar

way, objects of differing natures, such

as language, neurons and the above

mentioned Internet. On the other hand,

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud talked about

fate and randomness in human-created

worlds, such as the stock exchange. This

French scientist is a pioneer in statistical

physics in the world of the stock exchange and has established a company that man

ages investment funds with techniques ig nored by most orthodox economists.

Gas and Light To this point, we have mentioned tech

nological applications with good pros

pects for adoption, but we also have

stressed the inquisitive attitude of scien

tific research. Nevertheless, voyeurism is

not enough to wholly satisfy a scientist,

who needs something else to quench the

thirst for knowledge, who wants to un

derstand and aims to set up a discourse.

Let us borrow some further quotes from

Poincar? and discover the second mean

ing that scientists lend to the word aes

thetics. Poincar? used metaphors to

describe his working method as a scien

tist in a way that may sound familiar to

those who know 20th-century art well. In

the first stage of his method, Poincar?

thoroughly and rationally barrages es

tablished structures with new questions and remarks. In the second stage, the

very scientific ideas that created a static

and coherent discourse become a cloud

of atoms in chaotic motion that collide

continually because of the heated room

temperature. In a subsequent stage, creative thought strives to create new

molecules, new links that generate a cos

mogony hitherto unknown. The final

configuration of a new scientific theory arrives at the unlikeliest moment, when

only intuition is at work. However, as

mentioned, this applies to any creative

act, whether scientific or artistic [4].

Scientific theories are alive. They are

born and they die. In the meantime, they

evolve, grow, mutate and reproduce.

They eventually suffer a process of adap tation according to the environment, in

order to fit in with scientific observations.

Science and its theories can be seen as an

ecosystem, just as biology analyzes the co

existence of different species. But what is

the motive power of each theory? It may be the same survival instinct that human

beings have. In fact, what makes a scien

tist look one way and avoid another per

234 Perell? and Altai?, Physics of Aesthetics



spective? What does the scientist want to

see?

Let us place ourselves, with the rest of

the contributors, at the limit of knowl

edge. We are in an ethereal state charac

teristic of undisciplined thought. At this

point we cannot believe that creation is

a privilege of art. Science plays?it must

play?an active role in creation. Each dis

cipline undoubtedly has its own mecha

nisms and rules, but we can have a fluent

dialogue if we try to speak from the

boundaries, where everyone strives to in

novate.

From Aesthetics of Physics to Physics of Aesthetics It is possible to mention an emblematic

case of coalescence between the artistic

atom and the scientific one. We have al

ready linked Poincar? with the art of the

20th century. Marcel Duchamp, sup

porter of non-retinal art, was interested

in the famous physicist and mathemati

cian's works [5,6]. We need only think

about the cloud in The Large Glass or the

lamp of ?tant donn?s to realize that his

work, when regarded from Poincar?'s

perspective, adopts a richer range of in

terpretations than those detected by art

critics with no scientific knowledge. Ac

tually, the ready-made itself, the Duchamp ian term par excellence, was previously coined by Poincar?. He called tout fait ob

jects the epiphanies resulting from a bar

rage of pre-established ideas.

Using the energy of the invited speak ers, we wanted to experience first-hand

how a new discourse takes form through

undisciplined atoms of ideas. Following Poincar? 's method explained above, we

wanted to heat the room temperature, to weaken the solidified discourses of

established science. The environment

helped us. On the one hand, the Audi

torium of La Pedrera, by the great An

toni Gaudi, is a good example of mixed

disciplines. On the other hand, some of

the science lecturers featured are well

known for having practiced this blend

and openly assert that science needs to

drink from other waters than its own to

continue advancing. This is the case with

Malina and with Gimzewski, who has

worked with artists such as Victoria Vesna

on an exhibition for the Los Angeles

County Museum of Art (LACMA), aim

ing to improve our conception of the

nano universe.

The scientific lectures prepared the

ground for a soft landing at the round

tables that closed each session. Never

theless, there was a risk in the experience that the result might not seem so sue

Fig. 1. Perejaume, Atmosferiques, photograph, 2005. (? Perejaume) Distorted image of a

crystal structure obtained by an electronic microscope, representing large constellations

of legacies of the past: books, paintings and other cultural objects.

cessful. In order to create the greatest

heterogeneity in the experiment's con

ditions, the roundtables were made up of

professionals from very different areas of

creation. What molecules derive from the

encounter of such unlikely atoms? Below

is a distillation of the experiment. Look

for the right pages to observe the crys talline structure that emerged from the

collisions.

In any case, let us contextualize each

roundtable. Before we talked about the

"Horizons of the Universe," inspiration was drawn from the Big Bang echo that

came out of Liba Villavecchia's saxo

phone. After the scientific lectures, it

seemed logical to clear a space in which

it was possible to focus our attention on

the relationship of "The Essence and the

All" in the first roundtable. The rela

tionship of the universe's ingredients on

a large scale with the intimate structure

of the atomic nucleus was scientifically discussed at the symposium. This is an

eternally considered classical subject out

side the strict scope of science. The artists

Perejaume and Jes?s Gald?n, the jour nalist Llu?s Reales and Villavecchia him

self reflected on the matter. In particular, the two artists were concerned with the

role of tradition. Perejaume imagines new creations configuring a universe

where, instead of stars or even galaxies, one has constellations of books, paintings or any other object (Fig. 1 ). This is a sort

of universe very similar to that of con

Perell? and Altai?, Physics of Aesthetics 235



^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^K^^^^^^^^^^ photo a ^^^^^^K^^^^^^^^^^^^K?^^^^^^^^^^^^^K^^^^^^^^^^L The uses a ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^k camera to reproduce ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ drawn by who ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ made a a ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^L hy Leonardo da

temporary cosmologists. Gald?n investi

gated the inheritance of art from Al

brecht Durer and Leonardo da Vinci to

our day (Fig. 2). The artist repeats again and again the same piece that Leonardo

did a few centuries ago, just as D?rer did

before him.

If we are to think about "Dominated

Matter," filled with technological pros

pects, we also need to know something more about "Design's Prospects," which

were discussed in a second roundtable

with other personalities from outside

the university research laboratories. A

refreshing contribution came from El

Bulli's new cookery, full of science and

technology, and its scientific adviser, Pere

Castells, with a performance showing how to prepare a mock caviar from fruit

juice. The session closed with infonomist

[7] Alfons Cornelia, ex-designer Mart?

Guix?, fashion designer Isabel de Pedro

and Castells himself seeking to guess the

routes of tomorrow's design. Cornelia

stressed the fact that new design, includ

ing the more technological variety, has a

strong aesthetic component. Guix? and

de Pedro agreed on the point that object and fashion designs will have to look to

science even more closely than they have

done.

The third and last roundtable, on

"Forms of Randomness and Complexity," involved the "Narrative Structures" de

rivable from any creative process. The

extremely complex labyrinths that any creation needs to traverse can be read

from a scientific point of view. The cho

reography of Angels Margarit, closely linked to chance, allowed everybody to

explore this idea (Color Plate F). Other

interesting visions of structures came

out of cinema, theater, dance and archi

tecture. Isona Passola, a film producer, showed the strong restrictions on pure hazard in contemporary cinema and

how difficult it is to break the classic struc

ture, a legacy from Aristotle and ancient

Greece, of the way a story is explained. Clara Segura, an actress, described simi

lar limits and referred to certain patterns that one cannot avoid in theater. Bene

detta Tagliabue, a well-known architect, also agreed with them. The three also

perceived that randomness still plays a

key role in their everyday work, although

finally some clearly identified patterns

emerge in all films, plays and build

ings. Words and terms from complex

ity theory can be applied to each of

these fields. Finally, we could not have

found a better ending than toasting with the wine from Mas Martinet, as sci

entific as it was artistic, that Sara P?rez

brought. We began this text insisting on the aes

thetic dimension of different aspects of

scientific research. Physics is providing new images?and a new aesthetics?

coming from mysterious parts of the uni

verse. New scientific discoveries are

enlarging the dimensions of our percep tion. New pictures, from the smallest, to

the largest and most complex, are con

stantly building up new forms of aes

thetics. In addition, as stated by Poincar?, new theories, formulae and laws in

science are constructed with specific

configurations of ideas. The discourse

emerges from certain visions, and aes

thetic principles appear now in a more

abstract way, with ethereal terms like el

egance, symmetry or simplicity. All sci

entists who participated in the event

talked about the importance of aesthet

ics in their work from these two perspec tives. After scientific contributions, the

236 Perell? and Altai?, Physics of Aesthetics



roundtables enriched the perspective with nonscientific personalities. In this

way, we sought to stress how aesthetic

components play a fundamental role in

any creative process, including those in

science. The objective was to look for

common points among very distinct com

munities and enrich everyone's perspec tives. Malina reminded us how little we

know about the world of our surround

ings and argued that this should open the

scientific mind to working harder on

"making visible the invisible." The effort

should take us away from applying only scientific methodology in the name of

objectivity and reductionism.

At the center Kultura Recerca Tec

nolog?a Universals (KRTU), we have con

tinued tracking through our annual

conferences the "New Frontiers of Sci

ence, Art and Thought." Although the

previous year's series of events focused

on Dal? and science, with art at its start

ing point, physics was the leitmotif in

2005. There was continuity nevertheless.

Picking up the spirit of the previous se

ries, some of the speakers at "Physics of

Aesthetics" mentioned the work of lec

turers at "Dal? and Science." We then

made way for "Collective Intelligence" at

the September 2006 series and are at this

writing preparing a book of the contri

butions from "Out equilibrium," held

September 2007.

Acknowledgments

We must acknowledge the cooperation of Fundado Caixa Catalunya and its president, Alex Susanna. It was a privilege to have at our disposal a setting such as Gaud?'s Pedrera in which to experiment as we have described here. The scientific community was rep resented through the Societat Catalana de F?sica (In stitut d'Estudis Catalans) and the Faculty of Physics of the Universit?t de Barcelona. We are also very grateful to the Barcelona Televisi? science program "Einstein a la platja." It presented a further incentive to spur on a great number of people with very dif ferent backgrounds. Let's toast the physics of undis

ciplined aesthetics!

References and Notes

1. J.H. Poincar?, La valeur de la science (Paris: Flam marion, 1905).

2. J.H. Poincar?, La science et l'hypoth?se (Paris: Flam marion, 1902).

3. <http://heart-c704.uibk.ac.at>.

4. J.H. Poincar?, Science et m?thode (Paris: Flammar ion, 1908).

5. G. Holton, "Henri Poincar?, Marcel Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art," Leonardo 34, No. 2, 127-134 (2001).

6. J. Perell?, "Poincar? and Duchamp: Meeting in the Fourth Dimension," Artnodes UOC, June 2005. Down loadable from: <www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/ art/perello0505.html>, ISSN 1695-5951.

7. This is a neologism that Cornelia uses in reference to the webpage he edits: <http://www.infonomia. com>. The site informs companies and their workers

about the newest innovations and the trendiest ideas

coming from any place, science and art included.

Josep Perell? (b. T?rrega, Spain, 1974) holds a Professor Lector position at the Departament de F?sica Fonamental of the Universit?t de Barcelona, where he teaches physics and math

ematical methods. He graduated and received

his Ph.D. in physics. His orthodox research

field covers the intersection between statistical

physics and finance (often called econo

physics). He is interested in the relation be

tween science and arts in research but also in

organizing events aiming to bridge the gap be

tween the two cultures. He haspublishedTeo ria de l'striptease aleatori (2004), mixing

poetry with physics and probability theory.

A poet, essayist, art critic, columnist and

dealer in ideas, Vicen? Altai? is at present director of the center Kultura, Recerca, Tec

nolog?a Universals (KRTU). He has been commissioner of exhibitions on artistic, liter

ary and scientific topics, as well as of the Year

Mir? (1993) and of the Year Pia (1997). He has led several multidisciplinary projects, among them the magazines Tarotdequinze, Eczema, Arties ?mdCave Canis. Among his

books are L'escriptura sense llan?adora

(1997), La Desconeguda (1997), La difi culta! (1999), Desglossari d'un avant

guardista (2000), Els germans (2002), Massa fosca (2005), Santa Follia de Ser C?ntic (2006) and Consola de Cadaqu?s o somnis d'un full putatiu (2007).

3

Perell? and Altai?, Physics of Aesthetics 2,o7



Color Plate F

?ngels Margarit and the Mudances dance company, Geografies, 2005. (? ?ngels Margarit) In this performance presented by Margant and

Mudances, randomness plays a key role. Random string forms were created by chance as the strings were dropped by a dancer driven by hypnotic Eastern mystical music. When the performance ended, the tracks remained; the white strings against the black of the linoleum evoked the structures of fate and the complexity of human life. See article by Josep Perell? and Vicen? Altai?.

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Introduction: Physics of Aesthetics: A Meeting of Science, Art and Thought in Barcelona