Shlain Lectures for Inaugural Hornsby MLA Series

Renowned author and speaker Leonard Shlain gave three lectures at Winthrop April 17-19 as part of the inaugural Hornsby Master of Liberal Arts Lecture Series. Chosen for the series of lectures because of his worldwide reputation, Shlain is a public scholar who knows no discipline boundaries. He is the author of three critically acclaimed, highly interdisciplinary books: “Art and Physics,” “The Alphabet vs. the Goddess,” and “Sex, Time and Power.” Each of the three Winthrop lectures dealt with one of Shlain’s books. His best known work, “Art and Physics,” had its beginnings in a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and in his daughter’s questions about what constituted “great art.” He happened to be reading a book on new physics at the time, and, through his attempts at understanding the abstract science, came to the realization that modern art and physics shared the same incomprehensible, elusive quality. This led to his epiphany: “Perhaps, I mused, there was a connection between the inscrutability of modern art and the impenetrability of the new physics.” In his lecture, Shlain described that connection as the view of reality. Moving through the classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern eras, he showed how artists' images, when superimposed on physicists' concepts, create a compelling fit. He juxtaposed the specific art works of famous artists alongside the world-changing ideas of great thinkers, pairing Giotto and Galileo, da Vinci and Newton, Picasso and Einstein, Duchamp and Bohr, Matisse and Heisenberg, and Monet and Minkowski. Shlain explored the differing world views of reality in non-literate, Eastern, and children's cultures and showed how their themes entered Western art in the late 19th century just prior to Einstein's complete revision of the Western notions of space, time and light. He discussed Einstein's second great 20th century discovery concerning gravity. Changes in music and literature also synchronized with those occurring in art and physics. For details of the ideas presented in Shlain’s books, visit his Web sites at: www.artandphysics.com and www.sextimeandpower.com and www.alphabetvsgoddess.com. Return to Main Page -->