Henri Poincaré, Marcel Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art

Author(s): Gerald Holton

Source: Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2001), pp. 127-134
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1577015
Accessed: 10-12-2018 15:43 UTC

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Leonardo

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Henri Poincare, Marcel Duchamp

and Innovation in Science and Art ABSTRACT

In the early years of

tieth century, the strikin
Gerald Holton developments of the pe
cluded a great increase
and professional attenti
Euclidean geometry. O
leading scholars of the
was Henri Poincare, w
a widely read theorist o
tific discovery process,
cerned with the role of
and the subconscious. H
chism. He recorded his admira- ings, and those of his i
iwo more different personalities can hardly be
could well have increas
imagined than the mathematician, physicist and all-round tion for a bible of anarchism, The
peal of four-dimensiona
polymath, Henri Poincare (1854-1912), and the artist Marcel Ego and His Own by Max Stirner,for artists already attr
Duchamp (1887-1968). But exquisitely attuned as he was to first published in German in 1844
possibilities presented
irony, Duchamp would have been delighted at this pairing, and translated many times [4].concepts. The working
one such artist, Marce
the more so, as will be shown, that some of his ideas on art Duchamp was co-founder of the
record directly his debt
can be traced back to Poincare's publications. New York Dada group and lovedlinked to Poincare-an
Poincare, a solid nineteenth-century figure, was a very sym- nothing more than to shock the
the interaction of greatly

bol of the establishment (Fig. 1), holding five professorships si- establishment, calling himself, in parts of the wider cultu

multaneously, as well as membership in both the Academie des one of his articles of 1915, an
Sciences and the Academie Francaise-a rare combination, iconoclast. He was irreverent, bril-
making him in effect doubly immortal. Nor did it hurt his
standing in society that his cousin was Raymond Poincare, the
Fig. 1. Henri Poincare, from the journal
prime minister and eventual president of the French Republic. (1921) frontispiece.
By temperament, Henri Poincare was conservative; he was
immensely productive, with a torrent of nearly 500 published
papers on mathematics. Many of these announced funda-
mental discoveries in subjects from arithmetic to topology
and probability, as well as in several frontier fields of math-
ematical physics, including the inception, in his book on ce-
lestial mechanics, of what is now called chaos theory [1 ]. And
all this was done with intense focus and at great speed, with
one work finished right after another. Moreover, justly re-
garding himself not merely as a specialist but as a "culture
carrier" of the European sort, Poincare also wrote with trans-
lucent rationality on the history, psychology and philosophy
of science, including his philosophy of conventionalism, in
such semi-popular books as Science and Hypothesis [2]. For cul-
tured persons all over the world, and especially in France,
these were considered required reading.
On the other hand, our Marcel, 33 years younger, would
help in his much more secretive way to fashion the aesthetic
sensibility of the twentieth century. The poet and critic
Octavio Paz went so far as to write, in the first sentences of his
book on Duchamp, "Perhaps the two painters who have had
the greatest influence on our century are Pablo Picasso and
Marcel Duchamp: the former by his works; the latter by a
single work that is nothing less than the negation of work in
the modern sense of the word" [3].
As this quotation hints, Duchamp was in his way an inheritor
of that strong late-nineteenth-century movement, French anar-

Gerald Holton (professor of physics and history of science), 358Jefferson Laboratory,

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. E-mail: <holton@physics.harvard.edu>.
/1 -l
An earlier version of this paper was presented on 5 November 1999 at the conference - -
"Methods of Understanding in Art and Science: The Case of Duchamp and Poincare,"
at Harvard University Science Center, Cambridge, MA.

? 2001 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 127-134,

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liantly playful, casually misleading, an ex-
perimenter in eroticism in art-the very
antithesis of bourgeois convention (Fig.
2). It could take him years to bring a
project to fruition; he would write several
hundreds of private notes on the way,
and ultimately published several boxes of
these notes in facsimile. But he also pro-
duced quietly a large oeuvre, even while
pretending, or at least pretending to pre-
tend, that he was ever the most
unpreoccupied, the most decontracte man
in God's wide world.

And yet, despite all their differences

on the surface, I shall try to indicate that
the minds of these two icons, Poincare
and Duchamp, intersected like two
planes in one of the spaces of higher ge-
ometry.

First, let us get better acquainted with

Poincare. As one of his biographers, Fig. 2. Photograph of Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz at the Pasadena Retrospective in
Jean Dieudonne, put it, Poincare's 1963. (Courtesy of Mme. Jacqueline Matisse Monnier. Photo ? 1963 Julian Wasser.)
teachers at the lycee in his native Nancy,
where Poincare rarely had to take a note
rebels were Riemann, the Hungarian
in class, had early identified him simply minds his Elements was and is representa-
as "the Monster of Mathematics." And tive of the height of human accomplish-Janos Bolyai and the Russian Nicolai
that he remained to his death at age ment.
58 To Albert Einstein, who received Ivanovich Lobachevsky, who all pro-
in 1912, the year when the 25-year-old what he called his "holy" book of Euclid- duced geometries in which the fifth
Marcel was really just getting started. ean geometry at age 12, it was a veritable axiom was disobeyed. As to Poincare's
"wonder." He wrote: "Here were asser- initial ignorance of that particular litera-
Poincare was a mathematical genius of
the order of Carl Friedrich Gauss. Be- tions ... which-though by no means ture, ignorance can be bliss, not merely
fore he was 30, Poincare became world evident-could nevertheless be proved because reading Riemann's turgid prose
famous for his discovery, through his in- with such certainty that any doubt ap- is no fun, but chiefly because Poincare's
genious use of non-Euclidian geometry, peared to be out of the question. This approach was original with him.
of what he called the fuchsian functions. lucidity and certainty made an inde-
Although Poincare generally kept him- scribable impression upon me...." [6]
II
self well informed of new ideas in math- Galileo, too, was stunned by his first
encounter with Euclid. It is said that as a It is easy to document Poincare's intel-
ematics, on this particular point his biog-
rapher allows himself the schoolmasterly youngster, destined to become a physi- lectual conservatism, such as for ex-
remark that "Poincare's ignorance of the cian, he happened to enter a room in ample in his refusal to accept Einstein's
mathematical literature, when he started which Euclidean geometry was being ex- relativity theory and in clinging to the
his researches, is almost unbelievable....plained. It transfixed him and set him notion of the ether. But we have learned

He certainly had never read Riemann" on his path toward finding the math- that especially those innovators, both in
[5]-referring to Bernhard Riemann, ematical underpinnings of natural phe- science and the arts, who are far above
the student of Gauss and the person first nomena. To Immanuel Kant, of course, our own competencies and sensibilities,
to define the n-dimensional manifold in Euclidean geometry was such an obvious are not easily pinned down intellectu-
necessity for thinking about mathemat- ally. They tend to have what seem to us
a lecture in June 1854. That lecture
(later published) and the eventual opus ics and nature that he proposed it as an to be contradictory elements, which
of Riemann's three-volume series of pa- exemplar of the synthetic a priori that nonetheless somehow nourish their cre-
pers are generally recognized to be constituted the supporting girder of his ativity. Thus there is also plenty of evi-
monuments in the history of mathemat- philosophy. dence of Poincare's willingness to face
ics, inaugurating one type of non-Euclid-But by the early part of the nine- the force of sudden changes. That trait
ean geometry. teenth century, a long-simmering rebel- emerged strikingly in his ideas about the
For over 2,000 years, Euclid's Elements lion came to a boil against the hege- psychology of invention and discovery.
of geometry had reigned supreme,mony of Euclidean geometry and The reference here may be familiar, but
showing that from a few axioms theespecially its so-called fifth axiom; that is so startling that it deserves neverthe-
properties of the most complicated fig- one implies, as our schoolbooks clumsily less to be mentioned-and read with the
ures in a plane or in three-dimensional state it, that through a point next to a eyes of the artists of the time.
I refer to the lecture "L'invention
(3D) space followed by deduction. Tostraight line only one line can be drawn
this day, Euclid is the bane of most pu- that is parallel to it, both of them inter- mathematique," which Poincare gave in
pils in their early lessons; but to certainsecting only at infinity. Here, the main 1908 at the Societe de Psychologie in

128 Holton, Poincare, Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art

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Paris. The fine mathematician Jacques and Paul Langevin-not to forgetwrite, in italics, "Motor space would have as
Hadamard remarked on that lecture Mozart, who spoke memorably aboutmany dimensions as we have muscles" [16].
theon
that it "throw[s] a resplendent light source of his musical thoughts as
relations between the conscious and the
follows: "Whence and how do they
III
come? I do not know, and I have noth-
unconscious, between the logical and
the fortuitous, which lie at the base of
ing to do with it." To tell the truth, these and Poincare's
the problem [of invention in the math- Poincare himself also confessed other attempts to popularize the higher
ematical field]" [7]. In fact, Poincare puzzlement about the sourcegeometries
of his must have left the lay reader
was telling the story of his first great dis- ideas. In the full text of Poincare's talk excited but not really adequately in-
covery, the theory of fuchsian functions of 1908, soon widely read in chapter 3formed.
of Happily, at just about that time
and fuchsian groups. Poincare had at- his popular book Science and Method help came by way of popularizations of
tacked the subject for two weeks with a (1908), he confessed "I am absolutely these ideas by others, which further en-
strategy (typical in mathematics) of try- incapable even of adding without mis- hanced the glimmer of higher math-
ing to show that there could not be any takes, [and] in the same way wouldematics be in the imagination of the young
such functions. Poincare reported in his but a poor chess player" [11]. But artists he in Paris. One such book plays an
lecture, "One evening, contrary to my went on to report to having important role in our story. In 1903, a
custom, I drank black coffee and could year after Science and Hypothesis, there was
the feeling, so to speak, the intuition, of
not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt this order [in which the elements of published in Paris a volume entitled El-
them collide until pairs interlocked, so reasoning are to be placed], so that I ementary Treatise on the Geometry ofFourDi-
to speak, making a stable combination" can perceive the whole of the argument mensions. An Introduction to the Geometry of
[8]. During that sleepless night he at a glance.... We can understand that n-Dimensions [17]. In it, Poincare's ideas
this feeling, this intuition of mathemati-
found that he could in fact build up one and publications are specifically and re-
cal order, enables us to guess hidden
class of those functions, though he did harmonies and relations .... [12] peatedly invoked, from the second page
not yet know how to express them in on. The author was a now almost-forgot-
suitable mathematical form. To be sure, after that intuition comes la- ten figure, the mathematician E.Jouffret
Poincare explained in more detail: bor: Invention is discernment, choice. But (the letter E. hiding his wonderful first
Just at this time, I left Caen, where I for that, priority must be granted to aes- names, Esprit Pascal). In 1906 he added
was living, to go to a geological excur- thetic sensibility in privileging uncon- a more stringent treatment, in his vol-
sion.... The incidence of the travel scious phenomena, "beauty and elegance" ume Melanges de geometrie a quatre dimen-
made me forget my mathematical [13]. How congenial this must have sions [18]. There is also a good deal of
work. Having reached Coutance, we
sounded to the artists among his readers! evidence that a friend of the circle of art-
entered an omnibus to go someplace
Poincare had discussed the nature of ists in Paris, an insurance actuary named
or other. At the moment when I put my
foot on the step, the idea came to me, discovery Maurice Princet, was well informed
also earlier, especially in Science
without anything in my former and Hypothesis. A point he made that par- about the new mathematics, and acted as
thoughts seeming to have pavedticularly the struck home at the time was that an intermediary between the painters
way for it, that the transformations I
had used to define the fuchsian func- concepts and hypotheses are not given and such books as Jouffret's. There is a
to us uniquely by nature herself, but wealth
tions were identical with those of non- are of scholarship by art historians on
Euclidean geometry. I did not verify to a large degree conventions chosen this
by case; in my opinion the best pre-
the idea; I should not have had time,
the specific investigator for reasonssenter
of of the impact, especially of
as, upon taking my seat in the omni-
bus, I went on with a conversation al-
convenience and guided by what he
Jouffret's books, is Linda Dalrymple
Henderson, who has discussed it in two
ready commenced, but I felt a perfect called "predilection" [14]. As to the prin-
certainty. On my return to Caen, for ciples of geometry, he announced his volumes, The Fourth Dimension and Non-
conscience's sake, I verified the results belief that they are only "conventions"
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art and
at my leisure [9]. [15]. But such conventions are not arbi-
Duchamp in Context [19]. I shall draw on
Poincare analyzed such intuitions in these
trary, and eventually have to result in a sources without shame.
mathematics that "sufficiently agrees"
these terms: "Most striking at first is this Of course non-Euclidean geometry
appearance of sudden illumination,with a what we "can compare and measure had been around for many decades,
manifest sign of long, unconscious priorby means of our senses." Lobachevsky writing in 1829 and Bolyai
work. The role of this unconscious work in 1832. But both were little read even
Part II of Science and Hypothesis, con-
in mathematical invention appears to mesisting of three chapters, was devotedbyto mathematicians until the 1860s.
incontestable." "It seems, in such cases, non-Euclidean and multi-dimensional Then, for two decades to either side of
that one is present at one's own uncon-geometries. In those pages there are1900,
nei- a growing flood of literature, pro-
scious work, made particularly perceptiblether equations nor illustrations,fessional
but and popular, fanned the en-
to the overexcited consciousness" [10]. thusiasm
great feats of attempted clarification by about that unseen fourth spa-
Hadamard collected a number of tial dimension.
analogy. To give only one widely noted
similar reports, where out of the example:
con- In attempting to make the This cultural phenomenon could have
tinuous, subterranean incubationcomplex
of the space of higher geometry aplau-variety of possible explanations. First,
subconscious there appeared, in sible, Poincare introduced a difference
a dis- one must not forget that this branch of
between geometric space and concep-
continuous way, in a rupture of startling mathematics was still at the forefront of

intensity, the conscious solution. lively debate among mathematicians

He"representative" space. The latter
tual or
mentioned Gauss himself, who spoke has three
of manifestations: visual space,
themselves. There were about 50 signifi-
such a rupture as "a sudden flash ofspace and motor space. Thecant
tactile lastprofessionals in Europe and the
of these
lightning," and similar observations by is the space in which we carry
United States working in that area. Sec-
Hermann Helmholtz, Wilhelm Ostwald on our movements, leading him to ond, to lay persons the new geometry

Holton, Poincare, Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art 129

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 could be a liberating concept, by hinting
at an imaginative sphere of thought not
necessarily connected to the materialistic
physical world that had been presented
by nineteenth-century science-which in
any case was itself in upheaval thanks to a
stunning series of new discoveries. And
above all, the new geometries lent them-
selves to wonderful and even mystical ex-
cesses of the imagination, not least by lit-
erary and figurative artists and musicians.
These included Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells,
Fig. 3. From Marcel Duchamp, Notes and Projectsfor the Large Glass, Arturo Schwartz, ed. (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1969. ? 2001 Artists
Rights Society [ARS}, New York/ADAGP, Paris.)
I"X < a^t .
p;tW'Hc~e~47 4..~tP4,) 1.
p A4.,eAk'1,m
(fov i</f;Cc ' i> 't -- f i'{ C t /..
3- ,c ' tt"--- ( t' t> ) f it ,hn
}T i; 2tit?l p Uf -76S/ t< 4(<t.
,,7 .-, -. (,. /.i /
JL^ 46sCL .'i F < ^u , 6,
t A
C^^tei du tJ( i^ ?)/1v c\t^
to one another by the 4th dim.
It. _/fl
_ . , ( ._,p..)
a n. 9 -
_. 7-4^
t If d;'etuf 1^ f ek?<X<tu rM^^<
130 Holton, Poincare, Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art
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the science-fiction writer Gaston de painting he called Lhomme intrigue par le
vol d'une mouche non-euclidienne.
Pawlowski, Alfred Jarry of pata-physics,
Marcel Proust, the poet Paul Valery,
Gertrude Stein, Edgar Varese, George
IV
Antheil, the influential Cubists Albert
Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, and so on- For French artists getting interested in
not to speak of Ouspensky and the The- these matters in the first decade or so of
osophists. Some painters were explicit the new century, Poincare's writing
about their interest. Kazimir Malevich whetted their appetite. They also found
his writings especially sympathetic, not
gave the subtitle Color Masses in the Fourth
Dimension to a work of 1915, and as lateonly
as because of his literary and rhetori-
1947, the surrealist Max Ernst produced cal skill,
a but because he defended the
Details of execution.
Dimensions = Plans.
Size of the canvas.
[31
The shadow cast by a 4-dimensional figure
on our space is a 3-dimensional
shadow (see-Jouffret Geom. a 4 dim.
page 186. last 3 lines.)
Three-dimensional sections
of four-dimensional figures by a space:
by analogy with the method by which architects
depict the plan of each
story of a house, a 4-dim'l
figure can be represented
(in each one of its stories) by
t2 three-dimensional sections.
These different stories will be bound
1
Construct all the 3-dim'l states of the 4-dim'l
figure, the same way one determines all the planes
or sides of a 3-dim'l figure-in other words:
A 4-dim'l figure is perceived (?) through an
oo of 3-dim'l sides which are the sections
of this 4-dim'l figure by the infinite numb.
of spaces (in 3 dim.) which envelope this
figure. - In other words: one can move
around the 4-dim'l figure. according to
the 4 directions of the continuum.
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
new geometries as conveniences or con- duce not only their existence but also idea. Analogously, Poincare had written
ventions rather than as synthetic a priori their three-dimensionality. Or one could in 1902 how we might observe in three
or as facts of experience, and because of imagine helping a two-dimensional or two dimensions what a figure is like
his opposition to reducing mathematics (2D) creature, which is living entirely on that exists only in the fourth dimension:
to logic, emphasizing instead the impor- a plane, begin to understand what a "We can take of the same [four-dimen-
tance of intuition, as we have seen. three-dimensional cone is like: Take a
sional] figure several perspectives from
To be sure, Poincare warned against cone (say a carrot), make a large different
num- points of view" as in rotating it,
attempts at easy visualization. But one
ber of infinitely thin slices, cutscutting
made it, etc. Duchamp himself, in one
could approach it by analogy, just as a
through the cone this way and that, of and
his notes in his work A l'infinitif,
creature in Plato's cave, seeing on its
lay the slices of various dimensionswrote:
for"The set of these 3-dimensional

wall only the shadows cast by persons that creature to inspect by crawling perceptions of the 4-dimensional figures
moving and turning outside, may in- around them. It will eventually get would be the foundation for the recon-
the
struction of the 4-dimensional figure."
In Duchamp's working papers, we even
Fig. 4. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Thehave evidence-so
Large Glass), to speak, a smoking
1915-1923. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier. gun-that
? 2001 Artists
he was intrigued byJouffret's
Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris.)
Treatise on four-dimensional (4D) geom-
etry. In his extensive notes of 1912-1914,
made in preparation for constructing his
ever-unfinished Large Glass, he wrote
(Fig. 3) about a passage inJouffret's book
on how a 2D shadow is cast by a 3D fig-
ure. Duchamp pointed to an analogy:

The shadow cast by a 4-dimensional fig-

ure in our space is a 3-dimensional
shadow (see-Jouffret Geom. a 4 dim.
page 186. last 3 lines.).... Construct all
the 3-dim'l states of the 4-dim'l figure,
the same way one determines all the
planes or sides of a 3-dim'l figure-in
other words: A 4-dim'l figure is per-
ceived (?) through an oo of 3-dim'l
sides, which are the sections of this 4-
dim'l figure by the infinite numb. of
spaces (in 3 dim.) which envelope this
figure. - In other words: one can move
around the 4-dim'l figure. according to
the 4 directions of the continuum [20].

I do not want to be misunderstood

here to imply that Duchamp was simply a

student and user of higher mathematics,
like a pupil in a class. Rather, we must
remind ourselves that artists do not of

course need to cogitate with the same

rigor as good scientists. Their uses of sci-
ence, or of scientific fascinations like the
fourth dimension, are likely to be scien-
tifically casual, perhaps not scientific at
all. And thank goodness for that! They
can turn the reports of science into
something new through their sensibili-
ties. For example, some of the most ad-
venturous pictorial artists of that period
were especially impressed by the new
idea that surfaces and spaces may exist
with varying curvatures, which distorted
the figures that moved in them, contrary
to the linear perspective system that had
dominated painting for centuries.
Consider for example the morphing of
a body in n-dimensional space, a space
which itself can be curved, as the body is
transported in that space from one region
to another. To prepare yourself by an
analogy, look first at a part of a globe rep-

Holton, Poincare, Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art 131

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 Il
hi

Fig. 5. E. Jouffret's guide for presenting four dimensions on paper. From E. Jouffret, Traite eklmentaire de geomtrie ta quatre dimensions et
introduction a la geometrie a n dimensions (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1903) pp. 152, 153.

resenting our Earth, say at a state such as I mentioned that, according to ing those years and by others in that
Kansas, which is a fairly rectangular terri- Duchamp's notes, an aid to his imagina- circle, there is here an ambiguity of form,
tory, defined by two parallels of longitude tion came from Jouffret's 1903 Treatise. certainly a turning away from the boring
and, perpendicular to them, two parallels Jouffret labored to describe indirect
old 3D perspective that had reigned over
of latitude. If we then moved Kansas up ways to visualize the higher dimensions most painting since the Renaissance. But
along the two longitudes, it would be- that could well have been of great ap- Henderson cautions: "In no way is a
come more and more squeezed, ending peal to some artists living through that causal relationship being suggested be-
up as a triangular slice, as the top of the revolutionary period. For example, see tween n-dimensional geometry and the
state reached the North Pole. In that Fig. 5, taken from that book. Henderson development of the art of Picasso and
spirit, one can then imagine the dramatic says of those illustrations that they are Braque" [25]. Among many factors that
distortions of 3D objects when moved the "sixteen fundamental octahedrons" may have influenced those artists-some
around in non-Euclidean space, exhibit- of an ikosatetrahedroid (made up of palpable,
24 others almost subliminal-she
ing surrealistic flexibility and fluidity. octahedrons) "projected on a twonotes di- the proof that the new x-rays fur-
Thoughts of this kind seem tomensional some page, frequently being nished of the limited perceptual powers
art critics to be behind one of turned" to show aspects of their third of the unaided human eye.
Duchamp's remarks concerning and fourth
his dimensionalities.
mas- The sec-

terpiece, The Bride Strippedond Bareof the

by twoJouffret
Her illustrations is an
V
Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) example of 4).
(Fig. a projected "see-through
Octavio Paz calls it "one of the most her- view" of the 4D body [23]. Here, however, I find myself in the
metic works of the century" [21]. In its At this point one cannot resist showingmiddle of a minefield where huge
upper panel, the vaguely cloud-like also some of Picasso's works of 1909- battles are being fought by art histori-
structure represents part of the Bride. 1912, e.g. his 1910 portrait of Wilhelm ans. I withdraw cautiously. One is
Duchamp told Richard and GeorgeUhde (Fig. 6). Its complex construction tempted isto seek refuge in the suggestive
Hamilton in 1959 that the Bride is "half- based, in Henderson's words, on a idea "vari-
expressed by the philosopher Jose
robot, half-four dimensional" and he in- ety of planes and angles seen from Ortega differ- y Gasset. Writing in his book The
vited Pierre Cabanne and Andr6 Breton ent points of view" [24]. These Modern have a Theme (published in English in
to look at that part "as if it were the suggestive
pro- similarity to the triangular1933)fac-
of the reason why, for example,
jection of a 4-dimensional object" [22]. ets in Jouffret's "see-through" figures, relativity
re- arose when it did, Ortega said
There is additional evidence in the lit- sulting from the projection on two the most
di-relevant issue is not that the tri-
erature that Duchamp may have been se-
mensions of four-dimensional objects.umph As of one particular theory "will influ-
rious when making these comments. in other paintings made by Picasso encedur-
the spirit of mankind by imposing

132 Holton, Poincare, Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art

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 dissonant explosion of Stravinsky's Rite
of Spring,just in 1913; and, not least, the
stream of hot news from the laborato-
Fig. 6. Pablo
Picasso, Portrait ries, each more spectacular than the
of Wilhelm Uhde. last: x-rays, the electron, radioactivity,
(? 2001 Estate of relativity, the nucleus, the definitive veri-
Pablo Picasso/Art- fication byJean Perrin of the atomic hy-
ists Rights Society pothesis, Niels Bohr's 1913 explanation
[ARS], New York. of the structure of the atom. Consider
Photo: Giraudon/
Art Resource, New the reaction of the artist Wassily
York.) Kandinsky in his memoir about the early
years of the twentieth century [29]. He
had earlier experienced a block in his
artistic work. But when he heard of

some of those astounding novelties in

science, his block vanished, he per-
ceived "a collapse of the whole world,"
and so a new beginning was possible.
If a "spirit of the times," expressing it-
self in the interaction of different parts
of a culture's processes of discovery and
invention, is more than a nostalgic
phrase, one may perhaps hope to find a
living example of it in just those last
Banquet Years in Paris. Whatever seeds
were planted in the artists' imaginations
owing to the mathematicians' popular-
ization of the new geometry, those seeds
would also have found good nourish-
ment from all the other inseminating
influences of that era.

on it the adoption of a definite route," lead us back to the Hegelian postulates

VI
in which innovators in many diverse of the Zeitgeist and Volkgeist" [27].
fields find themselves doing analogous Yet, there remains in some of us the To end, a remark regarding my personal
things. Rather, "What is really interest- haunting feeling that something like amotivation in presenting this essay: Hav-
ing," he continues, "is the inverse propo-spirit of the times may exist. The psy-ing considered the thoughts of math-
sition; that the spirit of man sets out, chologist
of Edwin G. Boring once wrote aematicians as they acted on artists at
its own accord, upon a definite route," charming essay on this topic in which whatever remove, I should note that this
and that this process allows a theory he, to a good positivist, tried to demystifyis of course only one of many document-
be born and to manifest itself in differ- the concept of the "Zeitgeist as a vagueable examples of the interdigitation of
ent guises, producing "profound varia- supersoul pervading and controlling theone part of culture with another. For ex-
tions in the mind of humanity" [26]. immortal body of society." He put in itsample, we all know of the effect
Here, the philosopher comes peril- place the contrary definition, that theNewton's physics had on eighteenth- and
Zeitgeist is simply "the total body of early nineteenth-century poets. What in-
ously close to invoking the Zeitgeist, that
dark abyss that has swallowed up all who knowledge and opinion available at anyterests me even more, though I could
attempted to peer down into it. E.H. time to a person living within a given not show it in the case presented here, is
Gombrich warned of the danger in these culture" [28]. that at its best this process is a mutual
words: "Obviously there is something in That seems to me to bend too far in one. In the very nature of science-done-
the Hegelian intuition that nothingthe in opposite direction. Just think ofat-the-highest-level,
how one often encoun-
life is ever isolated, that any event and the turbulent new world of ideas and ters a humanistic, philosophical chal-
any creation of a period is connectedmeans by might have interacted with lenge
theat the core of the scientific one.
a thousand threads with the culture in alert soul of an artist, especially inThe interpenetration reveals itself
Paris
which it is embedded. [Yet] it is one during the optimistic two decades through
just the use by scientists of meta-
thing to see the interconnectedness of prior to the catastrophe of 1914. phors Thereand of the thematic imagination,
things, [and] another to postulate thatwas the miracle of electrification of the in many cases enhanced by literature
all aspects of a culture can be traced cities; the futurism screaming from new and philosophy. Niels Bohr confessed
back to one key cause of which they areinventions such as cinema, wireless te- that he came to his complementarity
the manifestations. [This latter view- legraphy and radio, airplanes, and auto-principle in part through reading S0ren
point] demands that everything must bemobiles. Add to it the outrageous, un- Kierkegaard and William James.
treated not only as connected with every-forgettable, disjointed and asymmetricalEinstein's program of unification of
thing else, but as a symptom of some- dance movements introduced by thephysics was encouraged by his reading of
thing else .... But I see no reason why Ballets Russes from 1909 in Paris, under Goethe and other authors of the Roman-
the study of those connections shouldDiaghilev; the scandalous but irresistiblytic period in literature. Similar examples

Holton, Poincare, Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art 133

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can be traced in other sciences, such as
the debt of Kepler's astronomy to the
music theory of the day and Kurt
Goedel's inspiration from his study of
neo-Platonism, Leibniz and Kant.
That debt is repaid many times over
by the effect that new scientific ideas can
have on very different fields. Newton's
Principia was discussed by the founding
fathers as containing a model for the
Constitution of the United States. Simi-
larly, after the experimental proof of the
7. Jacques
General Relativity Theory in 1919, there
ensued decades of transformation and
resonance among philosophers such8. as
Hadamard
2. Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis (New York:
1999). A good, non-mathematical account of the
Dover, 1952). Originally published as La Science etuse of the fourth dimension by scientists is
early
l'Hypothese (Paris: Flammarion, 1902). Alfred M. Bork, "The Fourth Dimension in Nine-
teenth-Century Physics," Isis 55 (1964) pp. 326-338.
3. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped
Bare (New York: Viking Press, 1978) p. 1. 21. Paz [3] p. 29.
4. Quoted in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 22. Henderson [19] p. 57.
Duchamp in Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1998) pp. 61-62. 23. Henderson [19] p. 57.
5. Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 11 (New 24. Henderson [19] p. 58.
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973) p. 53.
25. Henderson [19] p. 58.
6. In Paul A. Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-
26. Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme (New
Scientist (Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philoso-
York: W.W. Norton, 1933) pp. 135-136.
phers, Inc., 1949) p. 9.
27. E.H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Ox-
Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in
ford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969) pp. 30-31. I
the Mathematical Field (New York: Dover, 1945) p. 12.
thank one of my anonymous reviewers for guiding
me to this reference.
[7] p. 14.

Henri Bergson, A.N. Whitehead and

9. Hadamard [7] p. 13. 28. Edwin G. Boring, ed., The Validation of Scientific
Theories (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1956) p. 215.
Karl Popper, as well as among literary
10. Hadamard [7] pp. 14-15.
figures such as William Carlos Williams, 29. Wassily Kandinsky, Ruckblick (Baden-Baden,
11. Henri Poincare, Science and Method (New York: Germany: Woldemar Klein Verlag, 1955) p. 16.
Archibald MacLeish, e.e. cummings,
Dover, 1952) p. 49. Originally published as Science et
Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Herman Methode (Paris: Flammarion, 1908). 30. See G. Holton, Einstein, History, and Other Pas-
Broch and William Faulkner [30]. sions (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996; Cam-
12. Poincare [11] pp. 49-50. bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), Chapter 6,
Indeed, a culture is kept alive by the "Einstein's Influence on the Culture of Our Time."
13. Poincare [11] p. 396.
interaction of all its parts. Its progress is
an alchemical process, in which all its 14. Poincare [2] p. 167.
varied ingredients can combine to form 15. Poincare [2] p. 50.
newjewels. On this point, I imagine that
16. Poincare [2] p. 55.
Poincar6 and Duchamp are in agree- Manuscript received 12June 2000.
ment with me and with each other, both 17. E. Jouffret, Traite elementaire de geometrie a quatre
dimensions et introduction a la geometrie c n dimensions
having by now undoubtedly met some- (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1903).
where in that hyperspace which, in their
18. E. Jouffret, Melange de giometrie a quatre dimen- Gerald Holton is a professor of physics and
different ways, they loved so well. sions (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1906).
professor of the history of science at Harvard
19. See Henderson, Duchamp in Context [4] andUniversity. Among his book publications are
References and Notes Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought;
and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton,Einstein, History and Other Passions;
NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983). See also
1. For lists of Poincar6's publications, see Ernest
Science and Anti-Science; Who Suc-
Lebon, Henri Poincare (Paris: Gauthier-Villars,
Henderson's article, "The Large Glass Seen Anew,"
1912), and G. Mittag-Leffler, ed., Acta Mathematica
Leonardo 32, No. 2, 113-126 (1999). ceeds in Science: The Gender Dimen-
38 (1921) pp. 3-35. For the mathematical work that sion (with G. Sonnert); and Physics, The
has led to chaos theory, see Daniel L. Goroff's20.in-
Among many other quotations by Duchamp on
Human Adventure (with S.G. Brush). He
his
troductory essay to Henri Poincar6, New Methods of interest in 4D geometry, see a recent publication
Celestial Mechanics, Vol. 1 (New York: American StephenJay Gould and Rhonda Roland Shearer, is married to the sculptor Nina Holton; both
byIn-
stitute of Physics and Springer Verlag, 1993). "Boats and Deckchairs," Natural History (December have published in Leonardo previously.

134 Holton, Poincare, Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art

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