- Author: edited by Judith Wechsler
- Title: On Aesthetics in Science
- Binding: hardcover with jacket
- Size: about 6" x 9"
- Pagination: 180pp
- Published: MIT Press, 1979 (second edition)
- Condition: Good; jacket scuffed and a bit tattered at top and bottom margins; owner's name in corner of first page; some light pencilled checkmarks and marginal notes, some light underlining within
- ISBN: 0262230887
[OCR is approximate, as always]
There have been, in recent years, exhibitions that juxtapose abstract paintings with photographs taken through the electron microscope, and contemporary sculpture with molecular models, in order to demonstrate the closeness of modern art and the products of modern science for the effect of nature seeming to imitate art). And parallels between Cubism and relativity, or between action painting and the indeterminate character of quantum phenomena, have been put forward as evidence of a twentieth century mentality that is embodied in both art and science. The essays included in On Aesthetics in Science, however, deal with the subject at a much deeper level, beyond these somewhat facile likenesses and parallels. The book is not so much concerned with the products and artifacts of science as it is with the concepts, models, and theories that make them possible. And beyond that, it is concerned with the processes by which individual scientists--passing their ideas and data through Poincare's irreducible "delicate sieve" of the aesthetic sensibility-create their concepts, models, and theories. Elegance, sim-plicity, economy, beauty, the sense of rightness, of inevitability, of perfect correspondence these are the intuitive guides and formal goals that scientists have long recognized but have seldom explicitly articulated. Above all, the book treats aesthetics as a way of knowing, as fundamental to cognition. As the editor writes in her introduction, "The aesthetic factors in cognition-manifest in both art and science, though until recently more recognizable in art--are continuous, and broader than either. ... Aesthetics is presented in this collection as a mode of cognition that focuses on forms and metaphors used in scientific con-ceptualizing and modeling. .. Viewed as a way of knowing, aesthetics in science is concerned with the metaphorical and analogical relationship between reality and con-cepts, theories and models. As Cyril Smith points out, the search in science for models that illuminate nature seems to parallel certain crucial...
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Judith Wechsler 1 STRUCTURAL HIERARCHY IN SCIENCE, ART, AND HISTORY 9 Cyril Stanley Smith ON BROKEN SYMMETRIES Philip Morrison 55 VISUALIZATION LOST AND REGAINED: THE GENESIS OF THE QUANTUM THEORY IN THE PERIOD 1913-27 73 Arthur I. Miller THE MATHEMATICAL UNCONSCIOUS 105 Seymour A. Papert DARWIN'S "TREE OF NATURE" AND OTHER IMAGES OF WIDE SCOPE 121 Howard E. Gruber RATIONALITY AND INTUITION Geoffrey Vickers 143 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 171
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