Idea Materia


Book Description

How is it possible that throughout history several inventors around the world have independently invented the same things at the same time? Why does history repeat itself? How do birds know how to migrate, and how can “instinct” be explained? Idea Materia: Can Ideas be Measured by Science? offers an intriguing explanation: a subatomic field of energy that acts as a reservoir of knowledge and ideas that all species can access. Author Patrick J. Ricard proposes that this field — idea materia — crosses the barriers of time and space and allows for individuals to access ideas from the past as well as create new ones that are available for others to access. While this theory may seem radical at first, Ricard explores how the work of other philosophers and psychologists — from Plato to Jung — and theorists — from Vernadsky to Bohm — have hinted at the existence of something like idea materia. Ricard then expands on these existing theories of ideas to examine all angles of how we experience life, including: • Can one's identity exist after one's historic lifetime is over? • How can other species know and experience the objectively real universe? • Can “truth” be known given how human knowledge is obtained and organized? Covering the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, linguistics, logic, particle physics, mathematics, psychology, and religion, Idea Materia: Can Ideas be Measured by Science? is both accessible for those new to these areas of study, and thought-provoking for those already possessing such a background. This is a book that encourages ongoing rumination long after you have finished the last page as you will look at yourself and the world in a new way.




Lumen Naturae


Book Description

Exploring common themes in modern art, mathematics, and science, including the concept of space, the notion of randomness, and the shape of the cosmos. This is a book about art—and a book about mathematics and physics. In Lumen Naturae (the title refers to a purely immanent, non-supernatural form of enlightenment), mathematical physicist Matilde Marcolli explores common themes in modern art and modern science—the concept of space, the notion of randomness, the shape of the cosmos, and other puzzles of the universe—while mapping convergences with the work of such artists as Paul Cezanne, Mark Rothko, Sol LeWitt, and Lee Krasner. Her account, focusing on questions she has investigated in her own scientific work, is illustrated by more than two hundred color images of artworks by modern and contemporary artists. Thus Marcolli finds in still life paintings broad and deep philosophical reflections on space and time, and connects notions of space in mathematics to works by Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, and others. She considers the relation of entropy and art and how notions of entropy have been expressed by such artists as Hans Arp and Fernand Léger; and traces the evolution of randomness as a mode of artistic expression. She analyzes the relation between graphical illustration and scientific text, and offers her own watercolor-decorated mathematical notebooks. Throughout, she balances discussions of science with explorations of art, using one to inform the other. (She employs some formal notation, which can easily be skipped by general readers.) Marcolli is not simply explaining art to scientists and science to artists; she charts unexpected interdependencies that illuminate the universe.




Art in the Life of Mathematicians


Book Description

Why are mathematicians drawn to art? How do they perceive it? What motivates them to pursue excellence in music or painting? Do they view their art as a conveyance for their mathematics or an escape from it? What are the similarities between mathematical talent and creativity and their artistic equivalents? What are the differences? Can a theatrical play or a visual image capture the beauty and excitement of mathematics? Some of the world's top mathematicians are also accomplished artists: musicians, photographers, painters, dancers, writers, filmmakers. In this volume, they share some of their work and reflect on the roles that mathematics and art have played in their lives. They write about creativity, communication, making connections, negotiating successes and failures, and navigating the vastly different professional worlds of art and mathematics.







The Art of Joaquín Torres-García


Book Description

Intertwining art history, aesthetic theory, and Latin American studies, Aarnoud Rommens challenges contemporary Eurocentric revisions of the history of abstraction through this study of the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García. After studying and painting (for decades) in Europe, Torres-García returned in 1934 to his native home, Montevideo, with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: "Abstract Spirit." Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the painter's aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-García's theories as self-contradictory, Rommens seeks to recover their creative potential as well as their role in tracing the transatlantic routes of the avant-garde. Through the highly original method of reading Torres-García's artworks as a critique on the artist's own writings, Rommens reveals how Torres-García appropriates the colonial language of primitivism to construct the artificial image of "pure" pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-García thereby inverts the history of art: this book teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today.










The Medical Current


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Denver Medical Times


Book Description




El Orden Simbólico de la Materia


Book Description

The Symbolic Order of Matter is the feature essay by Christina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda, who also combine to do the extensive interview with Jean Nouvel in this edition of El Croquis. 29 projects are detailed, including the monumental Judicial Centre in Nantes, the reworked Gasholder Housing of Vienna and the Burgos Museum of Human Evolution.