Roger Penrose, The Mind of a Physicist - STEM-ART #2
Roger Penrose is one of the few physicists to have publicly promoted the idea that there can be a genuine discourse between science and art. The Penrose Institute, founded in 2017, seeks to explore the relationships between physics, consciousness and geometry.
Penrose continues to exhibit his work, such as the Shadows of the Mind touring exhibition of drawings, and Illustrated Mathematics, held at Farley Farm, the home of Roland Penrose (Roger's uncle), one of the founders of the ICA in London.
I attended the opening of the Shadows of the Mind exhibition in London - cannot recall the year and cannot locate any online reference to the event! Must have been around 2000 or 2001. Anyway, was mildly amusing seeing what were sketches of physical processes being framed and hung up as art. It seemed to me a Duchampesque moment of turning thoughts into art. For the non-scientists, it was an insight into the geometric structures that underpin what may otherwise be inscrutable formulas.
Our reactions to the universe are essentially aesthetic, meaning that they are mediated by our nervous system; truth is beautiful, at least in the mind of the beholder.
The next step, the scientific step, is to try and understand such reactions; perhaps they tell us something about the structure of our mind or perhaps something important about the universe - probably both.
Penrose tilings have an interesting history, born from a fascination Roger Penrose had for the work of M. C. Escher that then developed into a correspondence that proved fertile for both men. It started with the design of the impossible staircase, which Penrose ascribed to Escher in a 1958 paper, but which Escher admitted to be far in advance of his own visual experiments.
Indeed, Escher died two years before Penrose's first paper on aperiodic tilings in 1974. Although Escher's designs are a refinement of periodicity and retain a fascination and beauty, we do not see how Escher would have handled Penrose tilings as an aesthetic discipline.
The point here is that the mathematics and science of aperiodic tilings were inextricably linked to their visual geometry, at least in their genesis and early development. As Penrose adumbrates in this short video, his whole thinking style is visual rather than algebraic, spatial rather than symbolic.
This is something I try to teach my students: to be able to flip between the diagrams and the formulas. Most importantly, a correct diagram will lead to a correct formulation of the problem.
images: 1; 2 (both cc-by-sa, wikimedia)
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Penrose is a legend!
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STOPI thought of Escher as soon as I saw the first img and read the first paragraph, but was surprised to find they're actually connected.
I too believe, generally, that art strives for Truth, just like science. Even completely made up literature. When a Rowling writes a Harry Potter, she isn't just making things up. She's interpreting her own life symbolically, and choosing a means of telling it that won't bore the reader. Fact itself will often fall on deaf ears, but embellishing it into fiction will transfer it to the listener in its proper size. It's like a snowball that melts as it travels. The sun that melts it is the Ego. We don't care about things that happen to others, or we care less than they do. If they are to make their own lived truth and experience concrete to us, they must exaggerate it, so that by the time it gets to our ears, passes through all the peelers of selfishness, the layers that will remain will represent its actual size. So we find ourselves not crying at a mere news report of a death, but we cry because a fictional hero died. I think the fictional death, in this sense, carries better the actual fact and experience of death.
Although this may take us far from the original post, there is some truth that we need to resonate with a story for it to have an effect. Hence why I prefer Jung's work on archetypes to Freud's obsession with neuroses. The archetypal psychodrama is internal and worth exploring for everyone, I feel. Listening to other people's dreams can be rather boring, however vivid the experience in their mind; I'm not a fan of dream interpretations, instead people should learn the techniques for generating lucid dream, then the story becomes real and any issues resolved in vivo rather than playing with post-dream fragments.
Perhaps that's why I don't read much fiction these days; even most movies are just obvious ersatz-emotional-rides. Why are horror movies so popular? Meet your own demons and see what happens. :-)
Thanks for the comment; haven't chatted in ages.
Oh after you get a bit older - old enough to have experienced some shit - horror movies are nothing. The only scary movies I remember were made when I was a child. I wonder if the genre is dead, or if it was never alive and I'm just more experienced now with real demons.
Just today a travelling friend sent me a fb msg saying 'they lost my luggage'. After some probing, she explained they misplaced it and will deliver it tomorrow. That right there is an instance of the storytelling emotion-manipulation strategy applied in real life!
Very interesting. I bought an Escher book with many of his drawings in the late 80s and were fascinated about them. Good that you use the method of teaching your students being able to flip between the diagrams and the formulas.
The link you gave here:
does not work but leads me back to your own article. Can you correct that?