Chaos - James Gleick [90]
“In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there’s only a small amount of stuff that’s important, and then seeing what it was. So they can do some of my research for me. When you look at early stuff of Van Gogh there are zillions of details that are put into it, there’s always an immense amount of information in his paintings. It obviously occurred to him, what is the irreducible amount of this stuff that you have to put in. Or you can study the horizons in Dutch ink drawings from around 1600, with tiny trees and cows that look very real. If you look closely, the trees have sort of leafy boundaries, but it doesn’t work if that’s all it is—there are also, sticking in it, little pieces of twiglike stuff. There’s a definite interplay between the softer textures and the things with more definite lines. Somehow the combination gives the correct perception. With Ruysdael and Turner, if you look at the way they construct complicated water, it is clearly done in an iterative way. There’s some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that. Turbulent fluids for those painters is always something with a scale idea in it.
“I truly do want to know how to describe clouds. But to say there’s a piece over here with that much density, and next to it a piece with this much density—to accumulate that much detailed information, I think is wrong. It’s certainly not how a human being perceives those things, and it’s not how an artist perceives them. Somewhere the business of writing down partial differential equations is not to have done the work on the problem.
“Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them.” He put the cigarette down. Smoke rose from the ashtray, first in a thin column and then (with a nod to universality) in broken tendrils that swirled upward to the ceiling.
The Experimenter
It’s an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that’s happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It’s startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one’s own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to–goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy.
—LEO KADANOFF
“ALBERT IS GETTING MATURE.” So they said at École Normale Supérieure, the academy which, with École Polytechnique, sits atop the French educational hierarchy. They wondered whether age was taking its toll on Albert Libchaber, who had made a distinguished name for himself as a low-temperature physicist, studying the quantum behavior of superfluid helium at temperatures a breath away from absolute zero. He had prestige and a secure place on the faculty. And now in 1977 he was wasting his time and the university’s resources on an experiment that seemed trivial. Libchaber himself worried that he would be jeopardizing the career of any graduate student he employed on such a project, so he got the assistance of a professional engineer instead.
Five years before the Germans invaded Paris, Libchaber was born there, the son of Polish Jews, the grandson of a rabbi. He survived the war the same way Benoit Mandelbrot did, by hiding in the countryside, separated from his parents because their accents were too dangerous. His parents managed to survive; the rest