Einstein, Picasso Quotes

“So, now I’ve become such a big schoolmaster that my name is even mentioned in the newspapers. But I have remained a simple fellow who asks nothing of the world—only my youth is gone, the enchanting youth that walks forever on air.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Like Female Nude, Feynman diagrams represent a world beyond the forms to which our perceptions restrict us. They are the most abstract scientific art existing today. The only barrier to further abstraction is that we must still represent a figure separate from its background. Thus we cannot represent or imagine something that is a wave and particle simultaneously. But subatomic particles are just that, and Feynman diagrams are presently our only means to view them in a way consistent with their properties.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“turned out that the proper visual imagery is generated by the mathematics of quantum mechanics, and it consists entirely of schematic representations of events, not pictures of objects.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“A hallmark of classicism in art and science is a visual imagery abstracted from phenomena and objects we have experienced in the daily world. There is no such visual imagery in quantum mechanics or in highly abstract art. Artists and scientists had to seek it anew rather than extrapolate it from the everyday world. Just as it is pointless to stand in front of a Mondrian or Pollock, for instance, and ask what the painting is of, so it’s pointless to ask what the electron under quantum mechanics looks like. Neither question has an answer, and neither Einstein nor Picasso could accept such a radical break with classical thinking.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“A hallmark of classicism in art and science is a visual imagery abstracted from phenomena and objects we have experienced in the daily world. There is no such visual imagery in quantum mechanics or in highly abstract art.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Kandinsky’s Improvisation, the first totally nonfigurative painting,”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment,”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“According to Bohr’s “principle of complementarity,” the atomic entity has two sides—wave and particle—only one of which can be revealed by any experimental arrangement. Depending on how you look at it, that is what it is.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“The lecture was meant to parallel the lessons painfully learned by atomic physicists, who realized the inadequacy of visual perception when they discarded the visual imagery of the solar system atom after 1923. In their scientific papers they often expressed their dismay over being forced to work without visual images. Bohr offered a stopgap solution in 1927, in a motif that has striking parallels to cubist multiple perspectives.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“(Despite being almost a century out of date and completely unworkable, this image of the electron still shows up in modern books.)”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“the visual imagery of quantum theory is generated by the theory’s mathematics. Physics came full circle back to Plato, who argued that mathematics is the key to visualizing nature.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Does the new idea lead anywhere? Does it inspire others to produce useful science or important art? Does it become part of a worldview? Clearly Einstein’s relativity theory and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon satisfy all of these criteria. Their creative drives became inspirations and their personas the stuff of which movies are made and novels written. Their great works, spun during the most intensely creative period of their lives, were at first spurned, then accorded accolades, then incorporated into the intellectual milieu that they themselves had spawned, and finally superseded. But they cannot ever be forgotten, because they are now part of the very rock on which all of science and art will be forever built.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“to work conceptually one must actually have a concept, as well as a theme and a way to merge them into a whole. The concept was a new depiction of space and time; “choosing a problem” meant choosing a scene in which this concept could be fully realized in complex and aesthetically satisfying ways.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“he gave up trying to derive Planck’s radiation law, considering this approach unfruitful and incorrect, and instead accepted it as a law of nature and turned to deducing its consequences.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“I soon learned to scent out that which might lead to fundamentals and so turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“The flash of revelation is not a what but a how. It does not provide new facts; rather, finding the right image or metaphor tells one how to think about facts already at hand. Insights or implications come later, as guidelines emerge that serve to constrain and direct new combinations of facts. These guidelines, in both art and science, both maintain logical continuity with previous work and are at once visual, aesthetic and intuitive. Such a structure for thinking is a powerful motivator and ingredient of creativity.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Wertheimer’s Gestalt theory of creativity asserts that the mind has an irresistible urge to create structures, or arrangements of facts into patterns that possess maximal symmetry. These are good Gestalts.38 Many cognitive scientists believe that Gestalt principles of perception are hard-wired into the brain and that their function is to make sense of the perceptions with which we are continually bombarded.39 People for whom this drive toward good form is especially strong are most likely to be personally offended by inconsistencies and unaesthetic representations.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“In network thinking, concepts from apparently disparate disciplines are combined via the proper choice of mental image or metaphor. The intense desire to solve a problem can produce stresses that in turn cause associations that are not possible in conscious thought—in other words, the mind brings up the problem in all sorts of unlikely contexts. Eventually, however, it must focus on particular approaches. It is this choice—finding the proper image or metaphor—that catalyzes the illumination, the nascent moment of creativity.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Activation is maintained in the unconscious by the intense desire to solve the problem at hand.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“All of this information is taken from long-term memory and mapped onto, or worked on, by a dedicated representational medium capable of dealing with logical reasoning based in symbols or elements not reducible to logical symbols, such as visual imagery. Conscious and unconscious thought occur in this medium.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“part of the mind to which the consciousness has no access but which does not have a particular set of emotional agendas separate from the conscious one.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Poincaré believed that in the unconscious “there reigns what I would call liberty, if one could give this name to the simple absence of discipline and to the disorder born of chance. Only this disorder permits of unexpected connections”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Poincaré had learned when to cease work on a problem, because “during the intervals he assumes . . . that his unconscious continues the work of reflection.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Moreover, that necessary key to scientific discovery—proper problem choice”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“To understand what constitutes high creativity, we need a theory of the dynamics of the unconscious: how concepts are moved about in the mind toward finding incredibly novel combinations.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Both new definitions of simultaneity are counterintuitive to everyday common sense because they do away with preferred viewpoints and so go beyond sense perceptions.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“Einstein’s temporal simultaneity shares with Picasso’s the notion that there is no single preferred view of events.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“The squatting demoiselle, represented simultaneously in full frontal and profile views, was interpreted as a projection from the fourth dimension. In the fashionable occult terms of the time, it is as if Picasso found a way to sit on the “astral plane.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“the simultaneous representation of entirely different viewpoints whose sum constitutes the depicted object.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

“His argument for an exact principle of relativity was that it was needed in order to remove “asymmetries that do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena,” as he began the 1905 relativity paper.5 For Einstein, as for Copernicus and Galileo, aesthetics were data.”
― Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc