For the Love of Physics

by Walter Lewin

  This is why I see a fascinating relationship between physics and art; pioneering art is also a new way of seeing, a new way of looking at the world. You might be surprised to learn that for much of my life I’ve been almost as obsessed with modern art as I have been with physics; I have a love relationship with both! I’ve already mentioned my large collection of Fiestaware. I’ve also collected more than a hundred works of art—paintings, collages, sculptures, rugs, chairs, tables, puppets, masks—since the mid-sixties, and I no longer have enough wall or floor space in my home to display them all.

  In my office at MIT, physics dominates, though I have two great works of art on loan from the university. But at home I probably only have about a dozen physics books—and about 250 art books. I was fortunate in being initiated into a love of art early.

  My parents collected art, though they knew very little about it intellectually. They simply went by what they liked, which can lead down some blind alleys. Sometimes they picked some great works, and sometimes some not so great, or at least so it appears with the benefit of hindsight. One painting that made a strong impression on me is a portrait of my father, which I now have hanging over my fireplace in Cambridge. It is really very striking. My father was a real character—and like me, he was very opinionated. The artist, who knew him very well, caught him superbly, from the waist up, with his large, bald, oblong head sitting between his powerful square shoulders, his small mouth set in a self-satisfied smile. But it’s his glasses that truly stand out: thick, black, outlining invisible eyes, they follow you around the room, while his left eyebrow arches quizzically over the frame. That was his entire personality: penetrating.

  My father took me to art galleries and museums when I was in high school, and it was then that I really began to fall in love with art, as it taught me new ways of seeing. I loved that in galleries and museums, as opposed to school, you proceed according to your own interests, stopping when you wish, staying as long as you like, moving on when it suits you. You develop your own relationship to art. I soon started going to museums on my own, and before long, I had acquired a bit of knowledge. I plunged into van Gogh. (You know his name is really pronounced van Chocch—it’s all but unpronounceable if you’re not Dutch, two gutturals barely separated by a short O sound.) I ended up giving a lecture about van Gogh to my class when I was fifteen. I would also take my friends on tours to museums sometimes. So it was really art that got me into teaching.

  This is when I first learned what a wonderful feeling it is to teach others—of any age—to expand their minds into new realms. It’s a real shame that art can seem as obscure and difficult as so much of physics does to so many who had poor physics teachers. This is one reason that for the past eight years I’ve enjoyed putting an art quiz on my MIT bulletin board every week—an image I print off the web, with the question “Who is the artist?” I give prizes—some very nice art books—to the three contestants who have the most correct answers over the course of the year. Some regulars spend hours scouring the web and in doing so, they learn about art! I had so much fun with the weekly quiz that I’ve now put up a biweekly one on my Facebook page. You can try it yourself if you like.

  I’ve also been lucky enough to have had some wonderful chances to collaborate with some amazing, cutting-edge artists in my life. In the late 1960s the German “sky artist” Otto Piene came to MIT as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and later ended up directing it for two decades. Because I had already been flying some of my giant balloons by then, I got to help Otto make some of his sky art. The very first project we worked on together was called the Light Line Experiment, and consisted of four 250-foot-long polyethylene tubes filled with helium that, when held down at each end, made elegant arcs in the spring breezes at the MIT athletic fields. We tied all four together to make a thousand-foot-long balloon and let one end float up into the sky. At night we brought out spotlights that lit up parts of the snakelike balloons as they twisted and waved in the most amazing, constantly changing shapes, hundreds of feet in the air. It was fabulous!

  My job in these projects was usually technical: figuring out whether Otto’s ideas for the sizes and shapes of the balloons would be feasible. How thick should the polyethylene be, for example? We wanted it to be light enough to rise, but strong enough to stand up under windy conditions. At a 1974 event in Aspen, Colorado, we hung multifaceted glass beads from the tether lines of a “light tent.” I made many calculations regarding the different balloon sizes and bead weights in order to get to a workable solution in terms of physics and aesthetics. I loved doing the physics to make Otto’s artistic ideas a reality.

  I got really involved with the immense, five-color Rainbow balloon he designed for the closing ceremonies of the 1972 Olympics in Munich. We of course had no idea that the Olympics would end so disastrously, with the massacre of the Israeli athletes, so our 1,500-foot Rainbow, which arched nearly five hundred feet high over the Olympic sea, became a symbol of hope in the face of catastrophe. A picture of the Rainbow balloon can be seen in the insert. When I began flying balloons to look at the universe, it never occurred to me that I could be involved in such projects.

  Otto introduced me to the Dutch artist Peter Struycken, whose art I knew well because my parents had collected his works in the Netherlands. Otto called me up one day at MIT and said, “There’s this Dutch artist in my office; would you like to meet him?” People always assume that if we’re from the same little country we’d like to chat, but more often than not, I don’t want to. I told Otto, “Why should I, what’s his name?” When Otto said “Peter Struycken,” of course I agreed, but in order to play it safe, I told Otto that I could only meet for half an hour (which was not true). So Peter came over to my office; we talked for almost five hours (yes, five hours!) and I invited him for oysters at Legal Sea Foods afterward! We clicked right from the start, and Peter became one of my closest friends for more than twenty years. This visit changed my life forever!

  During that first discussion I was able to make Peter “see” why his major problem/question—“When is something different from something else?”—all depends on one’s definition of difference. For some, a square may be different from a triangle and different from a circle. However, if you define geometric lines that close onto themselves as the same—well, then these three shapes are all the same.

  Peter showed me a dozen computer drawings, all made with the same program, and he said, “They are all the same.” To me they looked all very different. It all depends on one’s definition of “the same.” I added that if they were all the same to him, perhaps he would like to leave me one. He did and he wrote on it, in Dutch, “Met dank voor een gesprek” (literally, “With thanks for a discussion”). This was typical Peter: very very low key. Frankly, of the many Struyckens I have, this small drawing is my very favorite.

  Peter had found in me a physicist who was not only very interested in art, but who could help him with his work. He is one of the world’s pioneers in computer art. In 1979 Peter (with Lien and Daniel Dekkers) came for a year to MIT, and we started working together very closely. We met almost daily, and I had dinner at his place two or three times a week. Before Peter I “looked” at art—Peter made me “see” art.

  Without him, I think I never would have learned to focus on pioneering works, to see how they can fundamentally transform our ways of seeing the world. I learned that art is not only, or even mostly, about beauty; it is about discovery, and this is where art and physics come together for me.

  From that time on, I began to look at art very differently. What I “liked” was no longer important to me. What counted was the artistic quality, the new way of looking at the world, and that can only be appreciated if you really know something about art. I began to look closely at the years that works were made. Malevich’s pioneering works of art from 1915 to 1920 are fascinating. Similar paintings made by others in the 1930s are of no interest to me. “Art is either plagiarism or revolution,” sai
d Paul Gauguin, with typical Gauguin arrogance, but there is some truth in it.

  I was fascinated by the evolution that led to pioneering works. As an example, soon I was able to accurately tell the year that a Mondrian was made—his development between 1900 and 1925 was staggering—and my daughter Pauline can do that now too. Over the years I have noticed more than once that museums sometimes list the wrong date for a painting. When I point this out (as I always do), curators are sometimes embarrassed, but they always change it.

  I worked with Peter on a dozen of his ideas. Our first project was “16th Space,” art in sixteen dimensions (we beat string theory with its eleven dimensions). I also recall Peter’s Shift series. He had developed a mathematical underpinning to a computer program that generated very complex and interesting art. But because he didn’t know much math, his equations were bizarre—really ridiculous. He wanted the math to be beautiful but didn’t know how to do it.

  I was able to come up with a solution, not so complicated in physics at all: traveling waves in three dimensions. You can set the wavelength; you can determine the speed of the waves; and you can indicate their directions. And if you want three waves going through one another, you can do that. You start with a beginning condition and then you let the waves go through one another and add them up. This produces very interesting interference patterns.

  The underlying math was beautiful, and that was very important for Peter. I don’t mean to boast—he would tell you the same thing. This is the role that I have mostly played in his life: to show him how to make things mathematically beautiful and easy to understand. He very kindly always let me choose one work of art from each series. Lucky me, I have about thirteen Struyckens!

  As a result of my collaboration with Peter, I was invited by the director of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam to give the first Mondrian Lecture in 1979 under the vast dome of Amsterdam’s Koepelkerk. It was packed; there were about nine hundred people in my audience. This very prestigious lecture is now given every other year. The lecturer in 1981 was Umberto Eco, Donald Judd in 1993, Rem Koolhaas in 1995, and Charles Jencks in 2010.

  My collaborations with Otto and Peter have not been my only involvement in making art; I once tried (in jest) to make a bit of conceptual art myself. When I gave my lecture “Looking at 20th-Century Art Through the Eyes of a Physicist” (http://mitworld.mit.edu/speaker/view/55), I explained that at home I have about a dozen books on physics but at least two hundred fifty on art, so the ratio is about twenty to one. I placed ten art books on the desk and invited the audience to look through them at the intermission. In order to keep the proper balance, I announced, I’d brought half a book on physics. That morning I had sliced a physics text in two, right down the middle of the spine. So I held it up, pointing out that I’d cut it very carefully—it was really half a book. “For those of you uninterested in art,” I said—dropping it loudly on the table—“here you are!” I’m afraid no one got it.

  If we look back at the days of Renaissance art up to the present, then there is a clear trend. The artists are gradually removing the constraints that were put on them by prevailing traditions: constraints of subject matter, of form, of materials, of perspective, of technique, and of color. By the end of the nineteenth century, artists completely abandoned the idea of art as a representation of the natural world.

  The truth is that we now find many of these pioneering works magnificent, but the intention of the artists was quite something else. They wanted to introduce a new way of looking at the world. Many of the works that we admire today as iconic and beautiful creations—van Gogh’s Starry Night, for example, or Matisse’s The Green Stripe (a portrait of his wife) received ridicule and hostility at the time. Today’s beloved Impressionists—Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir—among the most popular artists in any museum today, also faced derision when they began showing their paintings.

  The fact that most of us find their works beautiful now shows that the artists triumphed over their age: their new way of seeing, their new way of looking at the world, has become our world, our way of seeing. What was just plain ugly a hundred years ago can now be beautiful. I love the fact that a contemporary critic called Matisse the apostle of ugliness. The collector Leo Stein referred to his painting of Madame Matisse, Woman with a Hat, as “the nastiest smear I have ever seen”—but he bought the painting!

  In the twentieth century artists used found objects—sometimes shocking ones, like Marcel Duchamp’s urinal (which he called “fountain”) and his Mona Lisa, on which he wrote the provocative letters L.H.O.O.Q. Duchamp was the great liberator; after Duchamp anything goes! He wanted to shake up the way we look at art.

  No one can look at color in the same way after van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Derain. Nor can anyone look at a Campbell’s soup can or an image of Marilyn Monroe in the same way after Andy Warhol.

  Pioneering works of art can be beautiful, even stunning, but most often—certainly at first—they are baffling, and may even be ugly. The real beauty of a pioneering work of art, no matter how ugly, is in its meaning. A new way of looking at the world is never the familiar warm bed; it’s always a chilling cold shower. I find that shower invigorating, bracing, liberating.

  I think about pioneering work in physics in this same way. Once physics has taken another of its wonderfully revelatory steps into previously invisible or murky terrain, we can never see the world quite the same way again.

  The many stunning discoveries I’ve introduced through this book were deeply perplexing at the time they were made. If we have to learn the mathematics behind those discoveries, it can be truly daunting. But I hope that my introduction of some of the biggest breakthroughs has brought to life just how exciting and beautiful they are. Just as Cézanne, Monet, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Duchamp, Pollock, and Warhol forged new trails that challenged the art world, Newton and all those who have followed him gave us new vision.

  The pioneers in physics of the early twentieth century—among them Antoine Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi—proposed ideas that completely undermined the way scientists had thought about reality for centuries, if not millennia. Before quantum mechanics we believed that a particle is a particle, obeying Newton’s laws, and that a wave is a wave obeying different physics. We now know that all particles can behave like waves and all waves can behave like particles. Thus the eighteenth-century issue, whether light is a particle or a wave (which seemed to be settled in 1801 by Thomas Young in favor of a wave—see chapter 5), is nowadays a non-issue as it is both.

  Before quantum mechanics it was believed that physics was deterministic in the sense that if you do the same experiment a hundred times, you will get the exact same outcome a hundred times. We now know that that is not true. Quantum mechanics deals with probabilities—not certainties. This was so shocking that even Einstein never accepted it. “God does not throw dice” were his famous words. Well, Einstein was wrong!

  Before quantum mechanics we believed that the position of a particle and its momentum (which is the product of its mass and its velocity) could, in principle, simultaneously be determined to any degree of accuracy. That’s what Newton’s laws taught us. We now know that that is not the case. Nonintuitive as this may be, the more accurately you can determine its position, the less accurately can you determine its momentum; this is known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

  Einstein argued in his theory of special relativity that space and time constituted one four-dimensional reality, spacetime. He postulated that the speed of light was constant (300,000 kilometers per second). Even if a person were approaching you on a superfast train going at 50 percent of the speed of light (150,000 kilometers per second), shining a headlight in your face, you and he would come up with the same figure for the speed of light. This is very nonintuitive, as you would think that
since the train is approaching you, you who are observing the light aimed at you would have to add 300,000 and 150,000, which would lead to 450,000 kilometers per second. But that is not the case—according to Einstein, 300,000 plus 150,000 is still 300,000! His theory of general relativity was perhaps even more mind-boggling, offering a complete reinterpretation of the force holding the astronomical universe together, arguing that gravity functioned by distorting the fabric of spacetime itself, pushing bodies into orbit through geometry, even forcing light to bend through the same distorted spacetime. Einstein showed that Newtonian physics needed important revisions, and he opened the way to modern cosmology: the big bang, the expanding universe, and black holes.

  When I began lecturing at MIT in the 1970s, it was part of my personality to put more emphasis on the beauty and the excitement rather than the details that would be lost on the students anyway. In every subject I taught I always tried where possible to relate the material to the students’ own world—and make them see things they’d never thought of but were within reach of touching. Whenever students ask a question, I always say, “that’s an excellent question.” The absolute last thing you want to do is make them feel they’re stupid and you’re smart.

  There’s a moment in my course on electricity and magnetism that’s very precious to me. For most of the term we’ve been sneaking up, one by one, on Maxwell’s equations, the stunningly elegant descriptions of how electricity and magnetism are related—different aspects of the same phenomenon, electromagnetism. There’s an intrinsic beauty in the way these equations talk to one another that is unbelievable. You can’t separate them; together they’re one unified field theory.