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:: introductory session

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:: session III : technology

Interlink I

A Symposium, integrating Art, Science and Technology
Brisbane City Hall, 8th October, 1983,
sponsored by:  the Royal Society of Queensland, A.N.Z.A.A.S., Queensland, and the Queensland College of Art


Points for discussion included:
contacts between the three cultural aspects, the use each makes of advances in the others, and the question: is creativity their main link?

The purpose of the symposium was:
to strengthen the affinities between facets of our culture; to enhance personal development by broadening horizons, to introduce forward thinking people to each other; and to stimulate improvement in our manufactured products competing on world markets.
 
Introductory Session
 
1. Welcome, by Professor J.M. Thompson, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Queensland; Chairman, A.NZ.A.A.S., Queensland Division.
2. Opening Address, SCIENCE AND THE ARTS, by Professor N.H. Fletcher, Se¼cretary, Physical Sciences, Australian Academy of Science; Director, Institute of Physical Sciences, CSIRO, Canberra.

Today we are going to discuss some of the relationships between Science and Art, or perhaps I should say between the Sciences and the Arts, for there is a great deal of diversity within each of these areas. Indeed we might have a useful and interesting symposium on the relationships between Physics and Biology on the one hand or between Music and Painting on the other. But there does seem to be a greater gulf between Science and Art, or at least between the way they are practised today, than between the subdivisions of either of those fields - I work with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, and I confess that even I find it difficult to imag¼ine it expanded to become the Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial and Artistic Research Organiza¼tion!
We may tend to think of this separation between Science and Art as being of comparatively recent origin - the "Two Cultures" of C.P. Snow - and to imagine that in earlier times things were different, but I rather doubt that this was so. In the Preface to his great work of 1870 "On the Sensations of Tone" the great German physicist, physiologist and musicologist Hermann Helmholtz wrote:
" The horizons of physics, philosophy and art have of late been too widely separated, and, as a consequence, the language, the methods, and the aims of any one of these studies present a certain amount of difficulty for the student of any other of them."

Things were apparently very much the same in 1638 when Galileo wrote in his "Dialogues Concern¼ing Two New Sciences"

" I come now to other questions ... which to some would seem very frivolous, and more especially to those Philosophers who are continually employed in the more profound ques¼tions of natural philosophy ... I think I can give you a Conceit of my own, relating to some problems concerning Music, a noble subject, of which so many great men, and even Aristotle himself, have written."

The same sort of problem of communication was perceived by the artist Albrecht Durer in 1525 who wrote:
" Sane judgement abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. The sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry ... The blame for this should be laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art." Even Plato in the fourth century BC complained rather petulantly " We must endeavour to persuade the principal men of our State to go and learn arithmetic" and had a sign erected " Let no one ignorant of geometry enter my door.".

In beginning today's discussion, therefore, we are facing a problem of long standing, but one that is caused, I think, by lack of time for consideration and by the existence of specialist languages that impede communication across disciplinary divisions. There are also many widely held miscon¼ceptions about the nature of science, and probably about the nature of art too, which need to be cleared away before we can begin.

One of these concerns technology - an indispensable part of both art and science but one that is distinct from both of them. A painter needs pigments, canvasses and papers with particular qual¼ities before he can realistically begin, a sculptor needs marble or bronze or stainless steel and the tools and skills with which to work it, a musician needs all the technology implied by the instru¼ments on which his composition is to be played. In the same way a physicist needs particle accelerators, oscilloscopes, and computers, a chemist needs N.M.R. and infrared spectrometers and a biologist needs centrifuges and microelectrodes.

In a sense we might expect that this technological dependence should link artists and scientists together, but I do not think this is the real point. Both art and science are essentially different from the technologies and skills upon which they depend and which they in turn generate. Each of them belongs to the domain of the mind; each begins in the imagination. A true scientist does not proceed by following the rules of "scientific method" any more than a true composer works by simply following the rules of classical harmony and counterpoint or of twelve-note tone-rows. It is true, of course, that some science is done this way and some music is written this way, but it is rarely good science or good music. Both of these must be, in the deepest sense, adventures of the spirit.

We could all gain something, perhaps, from the modest adoption of an emphasis contrary to that usually put forward by academics, critics, philosphers and historians. Let us think of science for a while as a glorious adventure of the mind, taking imaginative leaps and not worrying too much for the moment about the strict chain of formal proof. Any theory that is beautiful enough is almost bound to contain some element of truth, and it is sometimes better to be wrong with ele¼gance than to be right with dullness.
Conversely let us bring some of the flights of artistic fancy a little closer to physical reality. Let composers know and exploit the acoustical characteristics of particular buildings, painters and perfume blenders the chemistry of their raw materials and processes, novelists the structural gram-7 mar of language. A deeper knowledge and understanding of technology makes one its master and not its servant.

It is only by knowing and understanding the basic rules and techniques of one's craft that one can ignore them with creative integrity. Einstein would not have been able to create the theory of relativity without a deep and thorough understanding of Newtonian mechanics; Picasso's distorted and stylized faces would have lacked their authority had he not been able to produce the serene masterpieces of his Blue Period; the flamboyant creation of a white-hatted chef is suspect unless he can also produce a beautifully judged omelette!
I might go even further than this, however, and point out that the technology of science and the science of art both have their own sort of beauty too. The curve of an aircraft wing, the oiled precision of a ball race, the saturated beauty of laser light, are all aesthetically satisfying because of their beautiful economy and appropriateness to their function. The same is true of the grained and arched top-plate of a violin, the overspun copper on the bass strings of a piano or the polished elegance of an organ pipe.
At one further remove, the scientific principles that lead to the concordant tunings of musical instruments, the beautifully ordered scalings of organ pipes in length and diameter, the mixing of pigments to produce new colours, and the blending of chemicals to produce new flavours and aro¼mas can similarly excite our aesthetic appreciation. An understanding of these principles enhances rather than diminishes our pleasure, as the intellect joins with the senses.

I am sure that many of these matters will properly occupy our attention today, along with the kindred themes of the contribution that modern scientific techniques can make to basically artistic endeavours, and the aesthetics of scientific discovery. The program is, I am delighted to note, a Symposium in the proper classical sense of the word - a friendly discussion structured around a restrained drinking party!

I know that you all share my gratitude to the Queensland Branch of ANZAAS for its initiative in inviting speakers on suck a wide range of topics, ready and waiting, as they say in the Music Hall, to display their erudition for our enlightenment and to volunteer their virtuosity for our verification. I am delighted to declare today's Symposium open.
 

Session I : Art


1. ORBITS ABOUT A THEME 1981, John Gilfedder, a composition with a scien¼tific inspiration, dedicated to, and played by Mr Colin Spiers, pianist.
2. THE FUTURE IN ART - Mr John Rigby, Artist and Art Educator; Officer in Charge Fine Arts Section, Queensland College of Art and Trustee Queensland Art Gallery.

I could begin by saying it is probably well to refrain from giving title to an address before one begins to think about it, better to leave ones options open. There can be no specific predictions for the art of the future and it has been said art has no need of certainties.

Life and art is a sequence.

Art is what it is today because of what it was yesterday. Tomorrow will be the result of today and nothing is so apt to occur as the unexpected.
Artists, visual artists, are people of images, and may be willing or unwilling to speak about art. Verbal concepts are no less subtle than visual ones but they are less subtle when called upon to describe the sensory appearance of things.

For someone who has not particularly courted science and technology in my own art, I feel a little like the wise man of the East who was eating his dinner of dried figs, and at the same time explaining to an admiring group the beauty and healthfulness of a purely vegetable diet.

" Look at your figs through this" said a scientist present, handing the man a microscope. The pundit looked and saw his precious figs were covered with crawling microbes. He handed the mi¼croscope back and said, "Friend, keep your glass - the bugs no longer exist."
I may have been inclined to say to the scientist, like the man of the East, keep your micro¼scope, before beginning this short attempt to relate art to science, which necessitated some research. I now feel the look through the microscope was meaningful.

It is true to say that we are what we think, and not what we think we are, hence the value to todays symposium.
Artists have never been anti-intellectual, but to many their initial impulse towards their work is derived from experiences that are unique, often spontaneous, subjective and at times even irrational.

It has been said that science states meanings and that art expresses them. Scientific enquiry aims at verification and rejects emotional involvement. The scientist places a premium on logical processes, the artist, however, may consciously seek out the illogical in his search for a fresh statement.
Both Art and Science are certainly engaged in discovery. It is a lifetime endeavour, a lifetime search. They are both concerned with not only the actuality of the world one knows, but the other, ones ideas about actuality.

The certainties which previous centuries believed in are no longer certainties. Reality, built on external visible things does not exist as it once did, with the result that the artist in this century has endeavoured to render visible the invisible element in reality, to give expression to that which is hidden. The same can be said of scientific discoveries, and we are continually having to come to grips with everchanging situations.

Science and Technology have brought about a general revolution which art has shared. Painting has expressed the `age' we live in. The modern artist would not put as his first criteria the mirroring of nature. Subject takes on a secondary role, the figurative artist often subordinates natural appearances. He will distort nature if by so doing he can convey greater feeling through form-invention.

He has also, like science, transferred his attention more from the outward view of the world to the inner view, to inner perception.
Great art has subjective creation, wedded to, plastic and spatial effects.

Not all modern art, in fact, only a small part is purely non-objective, much is still nature¼derived without being transcriptive where the abstract elements are built into the work.
Where the art work has `plastic orchestration' elements such as planes, lines, colour and tex¼ture arranged in such a way that `movement pattern' allows the observer to explore the picture space experiencing harmony and a cosmic order.

To be more specific about the various links of art, science and technology perhaps it would help to use the terminology artist - engineer - machine. The relationship between art and tech¼nology is in no sense brand new. It dates back to Leonardo and beyond. There is not the time here today to expand in any depth on the artists of the Renaissance except to say quite a few were occupied with science and technology, with logical processes, with hidden structure, with anatomy, with machines, with perspective. However, until Cezanne the main certainty on which all art and the whole of tradition was built was the acceptance of external, visible reality.

One of the great changes resulted from the invention and perfection of photography and the film. Man now had for the first time another possibility for capturing reality. Those who wished to possess a portrait, a memory of something, a landscape or an animal no longer had to consult the painter. Thus art had a shifting of orientation.
The influences over the past one hundred and forty years on art have been many and varied. Because of the camera lens many artists felt a necessity to express themselves in abstract rather than in traditional illusionistic terms.

George Braque said "painting is getting closer to poetry, now that photography has freed it from the need to tell a story. Nevertheless, the camera did give to artists a new range of visual experiences. These artists responded to a greatly expanded world of study that was made possible, with new ideas and perception that is beyond the scope of the human eye.

There is nothing wrong for an artist to be stimulated by the use of this technology but he must be on guard against the mechanical camera that it does not subjugate both his aesthetic subjectivity and personal vision. There is no substitute for personal observation, for sensitivity and feeling, for deep profound experiences from which great art springs.
We all know that technology can be used for destructive purposes. I would hope there is more emphasis about its creative potential.
The future generations of artists will undoubtedly be attracted as many have been already to abandoning the use of known forms of art and developing an art using the new matrix of knowledge.

This will happen in painting, sculpture, film, music, dance, happenings, theatre and architec¼ture, animation etc.


LASER LIGHTS, COMPUTERS, HOLOGRAMS, ELECTRONICS

Dr John R. Pierce, Bells Laboratories director of research in communication sciences said "A composer equipped with a digital computer has no limitations except his own. The artist can use the plotter either by punched-card instructions or he can use a "light pen" to draw line and shapes on the tube.

Computer films turn out animated drawings in a fraction of the time otherwise needed. It can solve complicated design and construction problems. Computers can work with great speed and can eliminate considerable drudgery ... it would, I believe to true to say that it has yet to produce new sensibilities, new intellect, new emotions.
I cannot help but ask myself certain questions regarding this aesthetic revolution. On the as¼sumption that you cannot make others feel unless you feel yourself; you cannot make others see unless you yourself see, how can technology measure up? Can a machine reduce man to tears as can great art, great music, great poems.

All art must suggest something. Mere verbal description is not literature: It is only words; a picture, I believe, should have something to do with the soul. Music must be more than jingling tunes and mincing sounds.

Will a computer, a typewriter, electronic media with flashing lights, rise to the heights, achieved by the expression of mind speaking through its highest instrument, man, with often the simplest of materials.

Can we contrast the artistic with the scientific?

How questionable is the comparison between the development of art and the natural science? Structural treatment of pictorial themes becomes noticeable with Cezanne and Cubism. RHYTHM, PROGRESSION, REGULARITY, LOGIC OF SEQUENCE AND ARRANGEMENT. What do we mean by the word structure - it could be described as patterns - as energy events.

It occurs in chemical elements.
In art the word structure is used as the organisation of the picture surface, it also is pattern,
 
energy, pull and push, repetition, arrangement - it is what a work of art is built on, without it a work has no backbone, be it a painting or a sculpture.
These forms lie deeper than surface forms.
Electron microscopes show the most beautiful spherical structures in Diatoms, Silicon Dioxide, water-borne microplants, metals, that are as beautiful in arrangement as any non figurative paint¼ing.

The microscope will show patterns that have much in common with formal art. Scientific structure, where properties of matter are determined by nature in the way they are arranged, the way they are joined together, as in atoms. These structural laws are found in much of arts language in its structural principles just as they are part of science and technology.

Science is continually opening up new worlds with new values which make for new fields of endeavour.
Artists, too, have mirrored their times, with sensitivity and feeling for the environment and the human condition. Their vision has often preceded their times.
Many artists have seen a menace in too close a dialogue, with the structure of scientific ad¼vance whilst others have embraced it.
In this age in which the validity of the old humanist principles is being challenged and the efficiency of our tools has increased enormously, in its affirmations and denials, its confidence and its doubts, which make it so confused, it is still evident that art is reflecting the revolution in thought, ethics and even the condition of our existence.
For myself, I still have a predeliction to love the plain, homely, common, simple things of earth, of these to sing: to make the familiar beautiful and the commonplace enchanting, to search for a sincerity and simplicity of means employed.

Art will no doubt help to determine the nature and purpose of man in the future as it has in the past, walking hand in hand with technology and science, both of which will offer many and great possibilities for art; but I also firmly believe that there will be individual artists, adopting an
attitude of refusal, who will fulfill themselves both in the world and against the world with the simplest and most traditional tools, whilst others will express themselves in a language more appro¼priate to the atom, the computer and to electronics.

REFERENCES
SCHARF, Aaron, Art and Photography. DAVIS, Douglas, Art and the Future. KEPES, Gyorgy, Structure in Art and Science.
 

 
3. THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST IN SOCIETY
- Mr David Siebert, Artist and Art Educator; Senior Instructor, Painting - Printmaking, Queensland College of Art.
ABSTRACT
The essential role of the artist in Australian European society has never been fully realised. Very little in the visual arts has achieved much beyond craftsmanship since the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.

On the other hand an artistic tradition was operating throughout this continent for at least 30,000 years prior to European settlement which seems to have been historically essential, artistical¼ly substantial and socioculturally adequate. Unrecognised and unappreciated until recently, Aborigi¼nal art is the only unique visual art produced in this country which has world significance.

Essentially traditional Aboriginal culture is dead. However the conditions necessary for the production of objects which can be recognized as having `symbolic validity' outside the context of Australian society have finally arrived again. We are about to embark upon making a significant contribution to international civilization through our visual arts.
 
 
4. MUSIC AND SCIENCE IN THE TOTAL CULTURE - Mr John Gilfedder, Composer, Senior Lecturer in History of Music and the Arts, Queensland Conservatorium of Music.

Before such a distinguished audience I must say I appreciate the privilege of presenting the contribution of that Tonal universe, Music, to the synthesis we seek.
The "Interlinks" between Music and Science present themselves powerfully in 3 areas ... I The Scientific Bases within Music itself
II Parallel expressions by all the Arts and Sciences, of the cultural spirit of an Age III Science as stimulus to Musical invention.

I- Among Scientific Bases - we know that those wave-like ripples in the air are initiated by a vibrating Source, thence experienced as audible - Sound ... a strange and rich phenomenon ... For Primitive man the Universe was an audible encounter as much as anything else. For our Aborigines, just as the Painting was the visible sign of the Dream-Time creators, so was Music the audible sign, their very voices (Jones, T.).

So much for Mythology, which can speak beyond illusion to great truths about the Universe. Scientifically, Sound's parameters of Pitch, Duration, Intensity, Timbre arise from such source ele¼ments as Size, Tension, Rate of oscillation, Amplitude, Harmonic partials in the overtones, and, importantly, cavities and materials, auditoriums to at once resonate and clarify.
Most of all this was well-known in ancient Greece (what wasn't well-known to the Greeks?) as witness the theatres at Delphi and Epidaurus, where the slightest whisper from the stage, or Scena, is clearly audible on the highest rim of those conch-like cavities. (Aristotle in Cohen and Drabkin, 1948)

Quite recently, the new Concert-Hall in Melbourne is found to throw the sound upwards to "The gods", partially because the ceiling over the stage itself is too high to concentrate and clarify in the stalls. (The problem is more acute with large orchestral forces than small ensembles). Acous¼tics presents a facinating field for the meeting of Science and Music, raising other issues, such as Reverberation, Interference, Absorbtion, Decay-rate, and placement of Choirs and Orchestras. The great composers have possessed keen acoustic awareness, as in Handel's choice for the Water Music (1717) of Trumpets, Horns, Oboes, Bassoons to solidify the Strings in the open air.

Yet the Incantatory power of Sound, as our aborigines sensed it, and the Sistrum players in the temples of ancient Egypt (they called the Sistrum Sehem, meaning "spiritual power") is not ex¼hausted when we know its Material and Efficient causes, as Aristotle and Aquinas termed them - when the Problem is solved there remains the Mystery. The Magic, the poetry of it - the numinous power of Zeus the Thunderer - is spiritually real, binding and haunting composer and listener, from Paleolithic man to Electronic man. The proper response is a certain reverence and awe, not unmixed with delight and excitement.

I would crave your indulgence to pause for a moment on this question of the Problem and the Mystery, for I believe we have here a classic meeting point for Science and Art. Too much of the "Two Cultures" debate since C.P. Snow has been weakened by too little emphasis on the com¼plementary values of the Scientific and Artistic approaches. On the one hand Science has been sometimes mis-represented as an anti-cultural activity, or Art mis-represented as a sort of fringe gliding to the realities of a Technological society. (Jones, B., 1982).

It can be illuminating to consider any object for enquiry in the double aspect of a Problem to be solved and a Mystery to be contemplated. In the vision of Aristotle, supported by Aquinas, solution to the Problem lies in studying 2 causes - the Material cause (what it is made of) and the Efficient cause (what forces act immediately on it.) Thus Beethoven's 5th Symphony is a succession of sounds, powerful and tranquil, struck by players from a larger instrumental mass than in Mo¼zart's day - its physical impact has been overwhelming since the first performance in 1807. Fur¼ther dimensions are revealed in the forming of the sounds to striking and unified shapes and relationships, and in the spiritual theme that it is possible to encounter and contain the almost intolerable.

The Mystery resides in the Formal and Final causes. The Formal cause is more than the Musi¼cal Form, it is the Idea in the mind of the artist, and all the forming of the matter that follows. The Final cause is the ultimate purpose or vision for the completed design (Aquinas).

Now the further the insight into a Problem, by Science, the richer the values revealed in a Mystery to be contemplated. More recent minds of significance have expressed a similar vision, in differing terminologies. For Cezanne it is "Significant Form", for Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Ins-cape." I was delighted to hear the artist John Rigby term it "The inner element in Reality." Teil¼hard de Chardin (1957) has his own strange window upon this dimension.
" Like those translucent materials which a light within them can illuminate as a whole, the world appears to a Christian mystic bathed in an inward light which intensifies its relief, its structure and its depth."

The Japanese physicist, Yukawa ascribes the split in our cultures to the secondary role to which intuition and imagination have been relegated. He deplores the elimination of everything that cannot be directly documented, and points to ancient Greece, where "not only were intuition and deduction in complete harmony with each other, but also there was no such thing as the estrange¼ment of Science from Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts" (Yukawa, 1973). The communicating fascination of Professor Julius Sumner Miller's presentations have perhaps their roots in a simple fact: he sees the Poetry in Physics.

II - Parallel expressions of the cultural tone of an age, its World-view, or Weltanschauung, have drawn me for more than 20 years - I still hold it to be the most meaningful way to present the History of Music.
As one example, Geometric design in Art recurs in Stonehenge, Egypt, Greece, Gothic. There is marvellous Scientific skill in these great constructions (we are now clearer as to how Stonehenge was built), but as Plato confirms, the value is also a Symbolic one - Geometry reveals something of the Divine mind, ordering the web of the Cosmos ...
(Slides shown, of Stonehenge, Greece, Gothic)

Related to Cosmic order is Number-symbolism, a curious cast of thought, yet a recurrent one. Pythagoras would appear to have encountered it in his visit to Egypt as a young man, and devel¼oped it in such a compelling scheme, at Delphi, and later at Croton (where his "monastic" cult was partially based upon it) that it lingers from the Parthenon to Bach, and re-appears today in the thinking of Messiaen.

The classical playing out of Number-symbolism would run in this fashion : ONE is the primor¼dial unity of the Creator, TWO the dualistic principle, as between Father and Son, or Lovers, or Yan and Yin, THREE is the product of love, as the Holy Spirit, or again the means of balance, or of reconciliation of opposites. If the principle of 3 applies to the Deity, it must be not only a basic constructive element in all things, but Divine.

If THREE is the number of God, the 4th, created thing is Earth, with its 4 "Elements" and 4 points of the compass, and 4 seasons. Seven is the sum of 3 and 4, and Twelve its multiple, and both symbolize union of Spirit with Matter (Male, 1961).

Whatever the degree of validity of assumptions such as these, the principle of meaningful Order may be valid, and there are certainly moving expressions of it in the high Gothic (c.1150-c.1300), and these expressions are parallel. The Music is in 3 parts, both vertically (Tenor, Duplum, Triplum) and horizontally (3-time), like the facade of Notre Dame cathedral, and its 3 towers. Dante's "Divine Comedy" is in 3 books, each of 33 Cantos, on 3 levels of meaning, and every 3rd line rhymes. Science postulated a "Tertium quid", a 3rd element to connect Spiritual to Material, by medium of influences through the "Ether" (Lewis, 1963).

Even more central in Gothic culture (at least in its finest aims) was the harmonious penets ation of Matter by Spirit, in a Synthesis. In Philosophy Aquinas married Revelation with Reason, in Science his teacher Albertus Magnus and the astronomer Roger Bacon believed they balanced Phi¼losophy with Science. Despite genuine achievements of the (Tripartite) Guild system the most bril¼liantly successful synthesis remains the Cathedral. Chartres is the Parthenon of the Gothic.

The centuries from 1400 to 1900 are of course the seed-bed of the 20th Century, both in its aspects of achievement and crisis. From so complex a panorama we do best today to recall but a few of the most central issues.

In the Renaissance (c.1400-c.1600) man's fascination with the horizontal dimensions of his world (as contrast the vertical of the Gothic) is manifest in the perspective vanishing-points and shadings of the Paintings, that "hole in the wall" effect that is omnipresent, in the Barrel-vault and Loggia of the Architecture; the Music likewise gives forth dimension through Polyphony - lines interweave with artful grace on many planes - Tallis's great motet, "Spem in Alium" is in 40 parts!

Now Science begins to take wings after the restless curiosity of Leonardo, and the Baroque (c.1600-c.1750) presents a multi-planar cosmos, an endless whirling motion, whether Harvey speaks of the circulation of the blood, or Laplace and Newton of planetary motion, or Spanish mystics of swirling angels. Few are the resting-points for Music either - if we enter into Bach's great

Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor, we are swirled across the pages in unstoppable, energizing scrolls.

From around 1740 the Enlightenment hovers behind the Rococo and Neo-Classic, energizing certainly, but at once both liberation and deception. In Music the Sonata Form, wielded so cogent¼ly by those emerging genii of the Middle Class, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, reflects in musical logic man's new conviction that he can solve his own problems, now and in the future, in the "Coda" so to speak.

Romanticism rediscovers Feeling, Imagination and Nature, and yet more importantly, the Numinous ... that aspect of the Mystery rather than the Problem-solving initiated by the Enlighten¼ment. Tragically however, as Barry Chiswell has reminded us, the 2-Culture split was widened by the grim landscape sowed and harvested by the Industrial Revolution. Though Scientific improve¼ments to instruments benefited Music (as in the Boehm valve system for Winds and more brilliant escapement for Pianos) Music, like Poetry, turned its back on Science, to Nature and Fantasy. Tolkien (1964) reflects this revulsion - p.54 -
" Escape ... may proceed from a considered disgust from so typical a product of the Ro¼bot Age, that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness." Impressionism has affinities with Scientific interest in Light and Photography, and evokes magical overtones in the prismatic scattering of Timbres, as does Debussy, scoring as he does with a Pointillistic palette. Yet this very scattering is portentous ...
" What the Debussyan harmonies reveal no words can tell, but the overtones explain the jerry-building of our universe shudders in imminent ruin to engulf us all."

This remarkable poem by O'Dwyer (1941) is epic in style and theme, and was awarded the C.J. Dennis Memorial Prize in that year. I was privileged to live with it for over 20 years, completing a setting for Reader, Flute, Cor Anglais, Harp and Quartet in 1972. It was recorded in 1976.

If one were to ask, as we come to the 20th Century, what are the central themes, amid its myriad directions, then surely the answer would be - Fragmentation ... and Renewal ... Fragmentation - in the Relativism of all values, the yawning confrontation of Capitalism and Leninism, dissolution of the nuclear family, dissolution of the Nucleus, "Isms" rampant, Post¼Expressionistic nightmares as in Bacon's splintering screams, and the barely-stifled screams of Webern and of Stravinsky's and Picasso's clowns.

Renewal - in the Neo-Primitivism of the Fauves, Stravinsky, Orff and his Schiilwerk, a clear¼ing of the ground of bourgeois illusions since the Enlightenment by Becket's tramps, Ionesco's Rhinosceri, the clowns of Picasso and Rouault, and Cage's relinquishment of the Renaissance Ego, and by the shock of events themselves; by genuine renewals in approaches to Race and Nature and Science, and by Charismatic infusion of unlooked-for gifts and powers from the world of the Spirit (Meyer-Baaer, 1974).

III - Scientific inspiration for the invention of highly original Music has been a theme since at least Pythagoras. Whether Pythagoras leapt to his great principle after hearing a blacksmith's ham¼mers, as legend has it or by comparing the divisions of a Monochord, as he is represented at Char¼tres, it is difficult to exaggerate his later impact. The proportions 2:1 produce the Octave, 3:2 the 5th, 4:3 the 4th, 9:8 the Whole-tone. Apparently a Harmony of sublime and methodical design underlies Music, and more than Music.

Inspired by Pythagoras (as handed on through the Neo-Platonists and the De Musica of Boethius), the high Middle Ages elevated the Octave, 5th and 4th like a giant, gaunt Musico-Ar¼chitectural skeleton, filling the rounded hollows of Romanesque, and vertiginous, flame-like tracer¼ies of Gothic. These were the intervals of Divinity.

Through Boethius also the poetic vision of the Music of the Spheres, Musica Mundana, more than lingering through Palestrina and Bach and Beethoven, and inspiring Contemporary composers - Orff (Der Mond), Crumb (Night of the 4 Moons) and the transcendental Messiaen. Stockhausen too has come to see that we must sink our petty Egos into the Cosmoic Harmony before we are reborn.

(I heard Stockhausen speak along these lines in London in March 1982, while introducing his "Inori". His "Sternklang" or "Star-sound" is his most committed expression of a Musica Munda¼na concept.)

Stockhausen's "Song of the Youth" (1955-6) also carries a Musica Mundana feeling, with its quadrophonic Sound-sources; though only one boy's voice is used, praising God, a vast multitude of voices is heard in the final Montage, reaching our ears through a shower of Electronically generated inter-stellar momements of music.

Nebulas, Quasars, Planets, Black holes, and so much that is spatial and astronomical! In Me¼tastasis by Xenakis, 61 separate glissandi of the Strings are as calculated slopes, Sound-spaces of continuous evolution. These very glissandi, which he compares to surfaces and volumes led to the Philips Pavilion at Brussels Exposition, 1958, with Le Courbousier. Geometric progressions, espe¼cially the Golden Section, abound. Elsewhere, as in Pithoprakta, we seem to float through clouds of Sound-events, Eke the Siderial dust, their impingement upon us regulated by the Laws of Large Numbers (Laplace-Gauss, Poisson) ... (Xenakis).

No less than 7 Scientific phenomena are stimuli to Composition in my "Orbits about a Theme" (1981), and I warmly appreciate the suggestion raised by John O'Hagan and so definitively realized by pianist Colin Spiers, that it should open the Conference. In summary they are -
1. Orbiting motion         3. Planetary shapes        5. Density variation
2. Phasing ambiguities   4. Gravity          6. Galaxy spindle 7. Probabilities, with semi-structured systems.

Of these, to mention one that composers find fruitful - Phasing ... Two themes, or two Sonic fields may meet exactly, or on opposite beats, or somewhere between, or just miss, depending on their position in phase. Just as we seem to have grasped their relationship, it shifts ...

Such dimensions can be further extended by Electronic and Computer creation of Music - there is no reason why great works cannot be composed without conventional Sound-sources. Yet often limitation of the means available to him stimulates the Artist. With a computerized Studio at his fingertips the Composer is still wise to compose in the spirit of some of the great minds I have tried to outline here - still in need of that creative flash of intuition. So given, let us go forward, Science and Music into that "freedom of the Beautiful, wherein oceans remain unknown", more than disciplines of mutual regard, interweaving rather, Bach-like, in unfolding dimensions of Glory.
 
REFERENCES
AQUINAS. Summa Theologica la,xiv,8 - relates formal cause to the minds of both Creator and artist. COHEN and DRABKIN, 1948. A Source Book of Greek Science, McGraw-Hill, New York. quoting Aristotle, Concerning Audibility - "Sounds stifled when they arise are dim and misty; but if they are closer they thrust forth and fill all the air around them".
JONES, Barry, 1982. Sleepers Wake! O.U.P., Melbourne.
JONES, Trevor. The Art of the Didgeridu, a field recording of this ethnomusicologist, Monash University - Peter Mann Records.
LEWIS, C.S., 1963. The Discarded Image, Cambridge University Press. MALE, Emile, 1961. The Gothic Image, Collins, Fontana Edn., pp. 10-14. MEYER-BARER, Kathi, 1970. Music of the Spheres, Princeton University Press. O'DWYER, Joseph, 1941. The Trojan Doom, in Poems, Melbourne, Hawthorne Press. TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, 1957. Le Milieu Divin., Collins Fontana Edn., 5th Impression, 1966, p. 130. TOLKIEN, T.R.R., 1964. Tree and Leaf, Unwin Books, London.
YUKAWA, 1973. Creativity and Intuition, Kodado, Tokyo, pp. 108, 555. XENAKIS, Iannis. In Tempo., No. 93 - Towards a Metamusic.
 
 
 
Session II Science

1. EINSTEIN
- written and spoken by Mr David Rowbotham, Author and Journalist; Literary Editor, "The Courier Mail".
E=mc2 Einstein at Princeton It went off in his face.
The domed forehead was furrowed
And the mushed hair was blown more symmetrical. Into the neck stemmed the chin's ellipse in a fold, And the bridge of the nose was cut
Between the eyes to the great ravine of vision, Ridged in a curved geometry
To the corners of jaws that had compressed Warnings to two presidents: make
The bomb before Berlin; now Don't drop it.
The eyes burned black:
Inextinguishable fire internally consuming, And the underlapping pain
Left marks like hieroglyphs on papyrus. He simply wanted to be a man
Who brought his grain of sand To the common fund,
But gave the world a diamond mine And the blast that shaped his face To co-ordinates of cosmic death Where equations are wiped out And what remains is relative,
Lost to the countenance of its invention¼His friends themselves were horror-struck When, asked once,
What were the benched experiments that drew him To his millenniums' mite of algebra,
He answered (interstellar),
" I haven't been inside a laboratory for years."
David Rowbotham, Selected Poems, University of Queensland Press, 1975. Published with permission.
 
 
2. SYMMETRY AND ITS EXPRESSION IN ART AND SCIENCE

A Short Review. Dr N.H. Agnew, Scientist, Materials Conservator, Queensland Museum.

INTRODUCTION
Symmetry is not a trivial matter. Its use in science is a powerful tool in the discovery of struc¼ture of molecules, and among mathematicians it has long been a favourite topic. In art its influence has perhaps been less dominant but even here its use is often pervasive, as I hope to show.

Consider your hands - they are mirror images which cannot be super-imposed on each other. They are said to be asymmetric. A symmetrical structure is one which remains unchanged when it is reflected in an ordinary mirror image. That is it can be superimposed on its mirror image. The twin forms of all asymmetric objects are often called "left" and "right" to distinguish them, and no amount of examination of one will show a property not possessed by the other. This puzzled Im¼manual Kant: "What can more resemble my hand than its image in the looking glass ... and yet I cannot put such a hand as I see in the glass in place of its original" (Gardner, M., 1965). Alice too was likewise perplexed when she said the objects in her looking glass `go the other way'.

Louis Pasteur in 1848, as students of chemistry have been taught, picked out crystals of ammonium tartate which were identical except in their handedness. These mirror image crystals when dissolved in water possess the curious property of rotating plane polarised light - one form rotates to the left, the other to the right by an equal amount. Clearly here is a manifestation of asymmetry at the molecular level. So was born an important branch of chemistry - that of optical activity. Optical activity is shown by all chemical compounds whose mirror image are non-superim¼posable. A familiar example is grape sugar (glucose) or dextrose, which consists naturally of the right handed or dextro-form. Adrenaline exists in left and right handed forms, but only one form has much effect on blood vessels.

This odd duality is found in structures with any number of dimensions, including those with more than three. The discovery that fundamental subatomic particles have left- and right-handed¼ness (for which two Chinese physicists received the Nobel prize in 1957) was described by Robert Oppenheimer as a `gay and wonderful discovery' (Gardner, M_, 1965).

SYMMETRY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

We know of the ancient Greeks' preoccupation with mathematics and the Platonic obsession with order. There can be only five perfect polyhedra of Pythagoras and Plato - the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron. Each of these is a highly symmetric structure and each was identified by the Greeks with the four elements thought to constitute the world: earth, fire, air and water. The fifth, the dodecahedron, was associated with the cosmos. Incidental¼ly, the notion of a fifth essence is said to be the origin of our word `quintessence', and the dode¼cahedron was attributed also with mysticism. Doubtless this is why it appears in a Salvador Dali painting, "The Last Supper".

The Pythagoreans, however, believed the sphere to be perfect, all points on its surface being the same distance from its centre. This preoccupation with geometric and mathematical perfection was something of an illusion, as it turned out, in its application to the natural world. Planets, for example, do not move in circular paths at fixed speeds. And as Carl Sagan and others, notably Karl Popper, have pointed out the Pythagoreans teachings assumed the rigidity of religious dogma which stifled the free expression of contrasting views.

The most impressive physical manifestation of symmetrical structures from ancient times is, of course, the pyramids. Sir Herbert Read in his series of lectures on art for the BBC in the 1930's pointed out (Read) that the pyramids gain enormously from their hugh size, from the contrast they afford to the flat landscape of the desert, and the decisive accents they create in the strong sunlight. But, he says, "these are all adventitious aids and are not essentially artistic. The pyramids in them¼selves are wholly rational, and what is wholly rational cannot entirely satisfy the aesthetic sensibility. It has always been the function of art to stretch the mind some distance beyond the limits of the understanding. That `distance beyond' may be spiritual or transcendental, or, perhaps, merely fantastical; somewhere it will overstep the limits of the rational. This does not mean that art will outwit harmony; that it must always, in Bacon's phrase, have something strange in its propor¼tion. Gothic architecture is an art that achieves its most transcendental effects whilst obeying geo¼metrical laws as strict as those which control the pyramids; but in Gothic architecture geometry is the servant of art, and not its master".

Herein, I think, lies the key to the use of symmetry in art. Regular geometrical, and symmetri-cal structures are too cold, analytical and sometimes just boring - one dodecahedron is like every other one, yet who could deny its beautiful regularity. As William Blake said: "Grecian is ma¼thematic form; Gothic is living form. Mathematic form is eternal in the reasoning memory; living form is eternal existence". And yet despite this uncompromising analysis, in art both the creator and the spectator have found aesthetic gold to be mined in the use of symmetrical elements across the wide spectrum that separates the pyramids and the cathedrals; or, for that matter, the art of Michelangelo and that of Maurits Escher.
For example, consider the reversal of the figures in Figure 1. How tedious they would be were all pairs facing the same way. Yet the mirror image symmetry of the textile design is obvious. Contrast this with the stark bilateral symmetry of Fig. 2, which has been described as a visual analogue of a palindrome.

GEOMETRICAL PATTERNS
Continuing the line of argument that there is artistic value to be found in highly symmetrical structures we look next at the wonderful designs in the Alhambra of the Moors during the 15th century.

Here, as Bronowski has said, the artist and the mathematician in Arab civilisation have quite literally become one. "These patterns represent a high point of the Arab exploration of the subtleties and symmetries of space itself" (Bronowski).

In our own times the work of Maurits Escher the Dutch graphics artist represents a profound exploration of this theme. Escher in 1936 had visited the Alhambra and sketched the majolica tiles (Teuber). Escher's native genius in the design of flat tessellations predates his visit to Alhambra, however, as some of his earliest work from 1922, when he was finishing his training, seems to have been influenced by aspects of Art Nouveau, and also the current literature on psychology especially the forerunners of Gestalt. Escher's most famous works such as Sky & Water I (Fig. 3) and Day and Night (Fig. 4), however, date from the post-Alhambra period.

Escher's work has been widely used to teach formal symmetry to students of crystallography (Macgillavry; Glasser). The reason for its popularity in teaching is that symmetry is essentially a geometrical concept and diagrams such as Escher's are ideal for this purpose. There are only 17 possible crystallographic groups of symmetry structures and these were established on theoretical grounds by E.S. Fedorov in 1891. However, the Moors had already made use of all 17 symmetry structures at the Alhambra.

Crystals' external forms are reflections of their symmetrical internal arrangement of atoms. When a beam of X-rays is passed through a crystal a regular diffraction pattern can be recorded in film (Fig. 5) and mathematical analysis of this pattern using a knowledge of the arrangements of groups in space allows the structure of the crystal to be determined.
Escher, however, in a sense extended the theory of crystallographic groups beyond Fedorov's 17 by using "through artistic intuition" (Coxeter; Macgillavry) the added principle of colour sym¼metry.

It is interesting to speculate as to how art historians and critics will eventually judge Escher's work. If one is to assess him on the basis of his images such as "Stars" (a 1948 wood-engraving) then one would interpret his vision as that of a mathematically ordered, harmonious universe, or a neo-Platonic approach similar to that of Kepler. One wonders what William Blake would have made of it. Yet Escher himself tended to characterise mankind as "feeling people" (most artists) and "thinking people" (rationalists or scientists). There seems little doubt that he saw himself as belonging to the former group.

Is Escher merely a clever draughtsman using an intuitive grasp of mathematics to weave his intricate and sometimes surrealistic patterns; or is he a great artist, a genius in his own field? The quintessence of cubism is its presentation of contradictory cues (Gombrich). On this basis Escher can be allied, in much of his work, with the cubists.
Before considering the other side of the coin so to speak, that is art without discernible sym¼metry, or anomorphic art, it is worth looking briefly at a phenomenon which flourished briefly during the Renaissance - that of intarsia.

INTARSIA
Cut velvet brocade. Persian; early 17th century. Victoria and Albert museum (from Read with permission of the publisher).

Norman mosaic in Palermo; 12th century (from Scientific American, 1970, Vol. 223, N°2, p. 111, with permission of the publisher).

Intarsia uses the technique of wood inlay or marquetry. In Florence in 1478 there were 84 workshops where it was the main activity. It was regarded for a short while as the pinnacle of artistic achievement (Tormey & Tormey).

The intarsiatori were masters of perspective who delighted in fully exploiting the theory of perspective to represent the three-dimensional world on two-dimensional wooden panels. Polyhe¼drons were frequently represented - again an influence of the Platonic Dialogues, particularly the Timaeus, which outlined Pythagorean cosmology. The practice declined precipitously in the early 16th century possibly as a result of Vasari's judgement that it did no more than counterfeit painting; and Michelangelo's castigation that attempts to put art on a mathematical and perspective basis were of no use to a man "without the eye".

ANAMORPHIC ART
Both symmetry or its absence are, in a sense, grist to the mill as far as creative art is con¼cerned. While intarsia flowered briefly, another off-shoot of the understanding of the laws of per¼spective, anamorphosis (without form), developed. I will mention only one example here although many anamorphic paintings, both plane, cylindrical and conical exist.
The famous painting by Hans Holbein, `The Ambassadors', 1553 contains an anamorphic skull which when viewed on the slant is reconstituted. As can be imagined, because of its element of concealment and artifice anamorphic images have been popular in erotic art. Although anamorphic art is a technical curiousity it has been introduced here as a deliberate counterweight to the em¼phasis on highly symmetrical structures. Yet oddly, in a way, "for Jean Cocteau it was in the corridors of a cylindrical anamorphosis, like the Labyrinths of Knossos, that no mans land where poetry and science meet was situated" (Baltrusaitis).

ART AND NATURE THUS ALLIED

In Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado" they go to make Yum-Yum a pretty bride. By contrast there is the anecdote about Whistler who completed a portrait for a wealthy client who was dissatisfied. "I really think, Mr. Whistler", he said, "that is a bad work of art". Whistler shrugged and looked coolly at the man. He said, "But you must admit that you're not a good work of nature".

While both artists and scientists have each sought inspiration in nature the uneasy relationship between the two long predates C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures". Snow in his Rede Lectures ("The Two Cultures") recounts his irritation on frequently hearing how illiterate scientists are. Eventually at a gathering he was stung to ask how many present knew the second law of thermodynamics "The response" he says "was cold - it was also negative".

Despite this sort of public teasing which artists and scientists indulge it is my belief that their creative activities have much in common. The two poles of Escher's and anamorphic art are facets of man's endeavour to explore and probe to the very limits of his capabilities. Read has said that art depends for its value on some interpretation of life and scientists too are struggling with the same problems, albeit from a vantage perhaps less personally expressive.

Science can offer many new ways and perspectives for us to see things. Famous images such as an instantaneous photograph of a splash of milk by Edgerton of MIT, and others such as field-ion photomicrographs of metals or light patterns form a swinging pendulum (see for example 'Photog¼raphy as a Tool', Time-Life Inc.) present many possibilities for artistic creativity. These images may not be art; indeed, I am sure it will be argued that they certainly are not art, but they are beautiful and offer new vision and inspiration to artists.
Plato, one feels, would have delighted in the radiolarian forms (Fig. 6). These approximate the five regular polyhedra as well as the sphere and semi-regular solids known as deltahedra (Gardner, 1978). In his great classic On Growth and Form (1917) D'Arcy Thompson, describes (p. 695) radi¼olarian skeletons as being "of quite extraordinary delicacy and complexity ... and these complex conformations have a wonderful and unusual appearance of geometric regularity. All these general considerations seem such as to prepare us for some physical hypothesis of causation. The little skeletons remind us of such things as snow crystals (themselves almost endless within diversity), rather than a collection of animals ... Nevertheless, great efforts have been made to attach a 'bio¼logical meaning' to these elaborate structures ...". Here we have another example of the pervasiveness of the Plantonic influence.

Both Kepler (1611) and Cassini (1600) (Fig. 7) had studied the form and structure of snow flake crystals which, although all based on hexagonal symmetry, show no two ever alike.
Sky & Water (from “M.C. Escher, 29 Master Prints”, Harry N. Abrams Inc. New York, 1983, with permission of the publisher).
Day & Night (from “M.C. Escher, 29 Master Prints”, Harry N. Abrams Inc. New York, 1983, with permission of the publisher).
X-ray diffraction pattern of a beryl crystal (from “Photography as a Tool”, Time-Life Inc., 1972, p. 77, with permission of the publisher.
Radiolaria drawings by Haeckel from his monograph on the radiolarian from the Challenger expedition of 1872-76 (from Gardner, M., 1978, with permission of the publisher).
 
Volvox is one of the most beautiful aquatic algae. To see under the microscope, these tiny green spheres, revolving slowly through the water is delightful. Volvox has a topological problem, however. It reproduces asexually by invagination and nipping off daughter colonies which grow and rupture the parent. The process of invagination would place the flagellae on the inside of the sphere of the daughter colony. This was a source of bafflement until Mary Pocock, in the thirties, showed the immature colonies inverting like a mathematical torus swallowing itself. They do this after the 16-cell stage usually when the young colony is a hollow sphere but one in which there is a small opening (phialopore) at one pole (Smith).

Not all highly symmetrical living forms are aquatic or microscopical; Spaerotherium, the pill¼millipede and the armadillo can roll themselves into nearly perfect spheres as defensive postures (see for example, Lawrence, p. 98). These all have something in common with Escher's hypothetical beast Pedalternorotandomovens centroculatus articulosus (Fig. 8) which can roll like a wheel when it wants to.

The beautiful double helix of DNA has replaced the familiar planetary model of the atom of Niels Bohr as the symbol of science, yet as Bronowski shows (p. 20) in a computer graphic display on how to draw a chalice and the DNA spiral there are symmetry analogies going back to the Renaissance.
The Golden Section underlies much of the compositional structure of western art, and the Fi¼bonacci series and logarithmic spirals occur in art, mathematics, and nature as was lovingly pointed out by D'Arcy Thompson. More recently it has been shown (Dixon) that the florets of a sunflower - and many other plants - grow in spiral patterns that are fundamentally linked to the theory of numbers and the golden ratio (r : 1 where T = 1.618034 ... ).

SYMMETRY IN PRIMITIVE ART
Gombrich in his authoritative book Art & Illusion, notes (p. 23) that the primitive artist and the child tend to represent the human form frontally, horses in profile, and lizards from above. These representations tend frequently to be the most symmetrical, in which the bilateral symmetry of most vertebrates is emphasised, and much so called "primitive" art does, in fact, reflect this symmetry, although by no means all (Fig. 9).

The substrate of primitive art, if it is symmetrical itself, often seems to impose itself on the form of the decoration; for example, decoration of the human body is usually symmetrical, so too are decorations on carved representations of the human body; carved trees, and gate posts and so on. (Berndt, Pl. 12; 68; Gardner, H., p. 19, Pl. 22-1).
One should beware of a simplistic interpretation or explanation of primitive art, though, as decorations frequently have a totemic significance not apparent to our analytical eye.
 
Snow crystals by Kepler (1611) and Cassini (1600) (from D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth & Form, Vol. II, p. 696, with permission of the publisher).

CONCLUSION
In conclusion I have tried to cover an impossibly large subject. Aldous Huxley in his collection of essays The Human Situation says (p. 182) that man, in general, has an urge to order and an urge to meaning. I agree; I see these as compulsions with ancient roots. Perhaps the former, the urge to
order, is linked in a broad sense with the scientific tradition of describing, categorising, experiment¼ing; and, since no amount of science is ever likely to provide meaning in a spiritually comforting way, the urge to meaning can be equated with the activity of creative art.

My theme then is that there is a universality in the aesthetic appreciation of geometrical and symmetrical form which historically is pervasive in art; but that artistic creation extends beyond the mere recording of what is visually beautiful and regular in nature to the personal vision and inter¼pretation of a Leonardo, a Blake, a Picasso. But, nonetheless, there is profit where science can show new perspectives, tools, and ways of seeing. For example, the traditional craftsman using the computer could nowadays draw his designs for intarsia with greater ease and flexibility than his Renaissance counterpart. Perhaps this sort of wedding could produce a rebirth of skills long neglected. This is not to distract from the genius of former times - on the contrary. We should always be open to new ideas, tools and techniques. In stagnation lies creative death.

I have not touched on symmetry in music. Mozart, I have read (Gardner, M., 1965), wrote a canon with a second melody that was the first one both backwards and upside down so that two players could read the same notes from opposite sides of the sheet; and Bach's palindromic canons were used for contrapuntal effect.

I started by saying that symmetry is not a trivial matter and indeed it isn't. Telling left from right is a problem for some people (which can be hazardous when receiving directions in a motor vehicle from someone who has this problem). Also, distinguishing handedness has been the subject of psychological investigation which has shown the difficulty children have discriminating between b & d and p & q (Corballis & Beale). The great Helmholtz is said to have been largely "left-right blind".

If you remain unconvinced after all this fold your arms and now quickly fold them the other way! Its not easy without deliberation. These arm-folds are mirror images that are not superimpos¼able.
Looking glasses are so familiar to us we seldom realise their subtleties. Why for example does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down? Trace the outline of your face in the misty bathroom mirror and you will be surprised how small it is - half the size of your real face, and, what is more the mirror image that looks back at you is not the one the rest of the world sees. To see yourself as others see you look into two mirrors at right angles. Now, having recovered from the surprise of seeing someone who is somehow strangely different from the familiar "you", slowly rotate the two mirrors through 90° and watch yourself turn upside down!
There is fun in mirrors, handedness and symmetry. One could claim that symmetry has fasci¼nated man since Adam said to Eve: "Madam, I'm Adam", to which she promptly replied, "Eve". Had her name been Iris no doubt she would have said "Sir, I'm Iris". The name of a common Japanese make of car misses being a palindrome only through lacking the letter "A" in front of it. There is also the publication of the San Diego Zoological Society, "ZOONOOZ" - a palindrome which also remains unchanged when turned upside down. Another is the year 1691, attributed with magical powers in Robert Graves' poem (Parker), which begins:
 
The Two Witches
O. sixteen hundred and ninety one, Never was year so well begun, Backsy-forsy and inside-out,
The best of all years to ballad about.
A final example of things, that like Alice's looking glass images, "go the other way": "Lines that are parallel meet at Infinity"
Euclid repeatedly, heatedly, urged. Until he died,
and so reached that vicinity: in it he
found that the damned things diverged.
 
Piet Hein, Grooks VI.
 

Escher’s curl-up animal (from Gardner, M., 1978, with permission of the publisher).

Bookplate illustration of goannas (from “Australian Aboriginal art”, ed. Ronald M. Berndt, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1964, with permission of the publisher).
 
REFERENCES
BALTRUSAITIS, J., 1969. Anamorphic Art'. (Harry N. Abrams Inc.: New York). BERNDT, Ronald M., ed., 1964. `Australian Aboriginal Art' (Collier-Macmillan: London). BRONOWSKI, J., 1973. `The Ascent of Man'. (BBC: London).
CORBALLIS, Michael C. and BEALE, Ivan L., 'On Telling Left from Right', Scientific American, 1971, Vol. 224, No. 3, p. 96.
COXETER, H.S.M., 1971. `The World of M.C. Escher'. (Meulenhoff & Co., bv: Amsterdam). DIXON, Robert, 'The Mathematical Daisy', New Scientist, 1981, Dec., p. 792.
GARDNER, Helen, 1975. 'Art Throught the Ages', 6th edn. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York). GARDNER, Martin, 1965. 'Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions'. (Pelican Books: Middlesex). GARDNER, Martin, 'Mathematical Games', Scientific American, 1978, Vol. 238, Nol. 6, p. 18. GLASSER, L. 'Teaching Symmetry', J. Chem. Education, 1967, Vol. 44, No. 9, p. 502).
GOMBRICH, E.H., 1960. 'Art & Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation'. (Pantheon Books: New York).
HUXLEY, Aldous, 1978. 'The Human Situation, Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959'. (Chatto & Windus: Lon¼don).
LAWRENCE, R.F., 1963. 'The Biology of the Cryptic Fauna of Forests'. (A.A. Balkema: Cape Town). MACGILLAVRY, Caroline H., 1965. 'Symmetry Aspects of M.C. Escher's Periodic Drawings'. (Published for the International Union of Crystallography by A. Oosthoek's Uitgeversmaatschappij NV, Utrecht). PARKER, E.W., selected by, 1971. 'Discovering Poetry 1', 2nd edn. (Longman: London).
READ, H., 1936. 'The Meaning of Art', 2nd edn. (Faber & Faber: London).
SMITH, Gilbert M., 1950. 'The Fresh-water Algae of the United States', 2nd edn. (McGraw-Hill).
TEUBER, M.L., 'Sources of Ambiguity in the Prints of Maurits C. Escher', Scientific American, 1974, Vol. 231, No. 1, p. 90.
THOMPSON, D'Arcy W., 1917. 'On Growth and Form'. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge). TORMEY, A. and TORMEY, Judith Farr., 'Renaissance Intarsia: The Art of Geometry', Scientific American, 1982, Vol. 247, No. 1, p.116.
 
 
3. ORIGINS OF THE GREAT DIVORCE - SCIENCE AND ART
Dr B. Chiswell, Scientist, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and in the History of Science, Univer¼sity of Queensland, Hon. Secretary, Royal Society of Queensland.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.

from The Wasteland (Eliot 1922).

Down what long road had Western society travelled by 1922 to arrive at this agony of T.S. Eliot? What was the rottenness that he saw at the core of the modern technological/scientific soci¼ety?

The historian is concerned not with the rights and wrongs of society, but with the accurate description of the road travelled by society. But such description can never be a simple objective task; understanding of the past requires subjective empathy with the travellers on the road; for history is a study not simply of a collection of facts, but of facticity in relationship to definite individuals and groups of individuals.

In the following discussion I will not deal with the minutiae of history, but will take a broad general view of how a very large group of individuals, namely Western Society, has, since the 17th century, changed its view of Nature. My composition will demonstrate how such a change has led to the Divorce of Science from Aesthetics and Art.
Let me acknowledge some sources for my views and some steps in the development of such views.

Firstly, T.S. Eliot delineates most clearly the agony of modern man in a mechanistic universe. Secondly, George Kubler's "The Shape of Time" (Kubler 1962) opened my eyes to a new way of looking at Art and Art History.

Thirdly, my lectures to students at the University of Queensland on the History of Science have forced me to study the development of modern science and of how its commitment to a me¼chanistic view of nature has been seminal in the growth of our modern technological society. Such a study, when cast in a human context, quickly demonstrates the divorcement that arose between the Romantics of the 18th and 19th century and the Technologists and Scientists of the Industrial Revolution.

From these sources I will proceed to argue the following thesis:
Seventeenth century Western Society perceived science as one of a number of aesthetic pursuits; it was an art as were music, painting and literature. All such pursuits were seen as expres¼sions of the prevailing concept of nature; a concept of an ordered mechanical system (somewhat similar to a complex clockwork mechanism), grand in its operation and perfect in its form.

Having established this 17th century viewpoint, I will then move to discuss the changes wrought in it by the Romantic Revolution of the turn of the 18th into the 19th century. This Revo¼lution was an important manifestation of a profound readjustment of Western Society's view of Nature; a profound readjustment associated with one of the greatest Revolutions ever experienced by mankind - the Industrial Revolution. This change in our view of Nature has been the major force leading to the divorce between aesthetics and science.
In their standard work, History of Aesthetics, Gilbert and Kuhn (1953) state the belief that, since the mid-19th century, aesthetics has narrowed to cover only the arts of painting and sculpture (and to some extent architecture). To them, literature appears to have been displaced from the canons of things beautiful to man, while music, like science, is not discussed as an aesthetic pur¼suit. Such an approach reduces aesthetics to the study of some of the visual arts.

We may well not agree that modern aesthetics is as restricted as Gilbert and Kuhn claim, but within the context of this study it matters little. The question of relevance to us is not whether literature and music are aesthetic pursuits, but whether modern-day science is perceived by modern¼day man as possessing beauty - "that quality or combination of qualities which affords keen plea¼sure to the senses (especially that of sight) or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties" (O.E.D. 1959).
I believe that Gilbert and Kuhn are essentially correct in discounting science as one of the aesthetic pursuits of modern man. Let me hasten to add that I am not claiming that scientists today
do not see beauty in their work, but I am claiming that the great bulk of humanity do not see modern science as a thing of beauty.

THE MECHANICAL WORLD VIEW OF THE AGE OF REASON

For much of the 17th and 18th century, Britain was in the Augustan period, otherwise known as the Age of Reason.
Let me refresh your memory with some famous names:
Science            Isaac Newton F.R.S.       1642-1729
Robert Boyle F.R.S.       1627-1691
Architecture     Christopher Wren F.R.S. 1632-1723
& Design          Earl of Burlington           1695-1753
Painters           William Hogarth  1697-1764
Joshua Reynolds R.A.    1722-1792
Thomas Gainsborough R.A.        1727-1788
Writers            Joseph Addison  1672-1719
of Poetry          Jonathan Swift   1667-1745
and Prose        Alexander Pope  1688-1744
Daniel Defoe    1660-1731
Joseph Fielding 1707-1754
John Dryden F.R.S.       1631-1700
Samuel Johnson           1709-1784
The most important feature to notice in the work of all these men is their commitment to the concept of a mechanical universe, to an order and rationality in both nature and in man. Pope's (1956) epitaph to Newton sums up the coalsecence of views between literature and science:
" Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night God said Let Newton be! and all was light. or consider Johnson's (1759) Rasselas:
" The business of the poet ... is to examine, not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of a tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdue of the forest"

As the President of the Royal Academy (of Art) Sir Joshua Reynolds (1769) put it "the genuine painter forswears minutiae for loftiness and grandeur". The artist must reveal "the perfect state of nature".

The two very famous scientists in my list above, Newton in Physics and Boyle in Chemistry, described their scientific work in aesthetic terms consonant with the artistic commitment of their work. Indeed their descriptions are similar to the aesthetic language used by the other famous men upon the list. It is well-known, for example, that Newton's major output was in what we today would call theological writing, but we miss the point if we assume that Newton had two sides - a Physical and a Theological. To Newton, as to the Augustans in general, there was a prevailing sense of beauty which could be seen in the grandeur of order of the mechanical universe.
Boyle (1772) also described how he was constantly struck with the order and discipline of God's work whenever "with bold telescopes I survey the old and newly discovered stars and planets that adorn the upper region of the world; and when with excellent microscopes, I discern in other¼wise invisible objects, the unimitable subtility of nature's curious workmanship, and when in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of chymical forces, I study the book of nature ..."

In Faces of Modernity, Calinescu (1977) argues that Western man's concept of beauty was basically constant from Grecian times through to the end of the 18th century A.D. He claims that beauty was seen in the harmony between man and nature (or God) which led to a view of harmony between all pursuits of man. Whether Calinescu establishes this broad claim is debateable, but there can be little doubt that he demonstrates the close correlation of aesthetic approach of the Grae¼co-Roman and the Augustan periods. In both periods there is a drive to explore the beauty of nature, and to describe the perceived beauty in terms of the cyclical recurrence of perfect forms which demonstrate the perfection of the finite mechanical world.
 
THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE
In the year 1769 two important British patents were granted. Two patents for machines that, with their progeny, were to change the face of the western world. There is no reason to suppose that the registration of the "births" of Arkwright's waterframe and Watt's separate condenser (Cardwell 1972) attracted any greater attention than did the birth of Schleiermacher in the previous year, or of the births of Beethoven and Wordsworth in the year that followed. Yet all these births were revolutionary in their outcome. The Industrial and the Romantic Revolutions are indeed very closely connected.

" Whatever else is said about the Romantic movement, no one can deny that it really did hap¼pen. There really was a time in the early 19th century when to be a Romantic meant more than to be a dreamer or a lovesick youth; when an artist could accept the name with pride and take it to imply as the writers Stendahl and Beaudelaire did, that he was courageously facing the realities of the age" (Vaughan 1978).

It was Schlegel, Professor of Literature and F' e Arts at Jena, who, in the opening years of the 19th century, is credited with introducing the word Romantic and with postulating the opposi¼tion of the Romantic to the Classical. He saw the Romantic as that which emphasised the associa¼tive (symbolic) side of art, whereas the Classical dwelt on the formal aspects. But it was Schleiermacher who was in the forefront of the Romantic Revolution in his attack upon the Classi¼cal God of the Age of Reason. Like Wordsworth, his God was personally internalized and under¼stood by reference to Nature. Little surprise that he, like Wordsworth was accused of pantheism when he attacked Enlightenment theology, calling it "the artifact of calculating intellect ... (in which) ... everything elapses into callous argumentation ... (and where) ... even the sublimest sub¼jects are made pawns of controversy between competing schools of thought" (Schleiermacher, 1821).

Romanticism saw Nature (and God) in terms of individual, highly personal, concepts of beauty and truth. Such a view was diametrically opposed to the generalised form of Classicism's concepts of ideal beauty and truth. The developing aesthetic of the 19th century moved rapidly away from the societal-wide acceptation of certain artistic forms as being expressions of beauty, to embrace the idea that beauty was the internalized response by the individual to artistic material. Thus, to Scho¼penhauer (1819), art had become a mode of expressing reality, and the more challenging the indi¼vidual found this reality, the greater was the art.

The attack by the Romantics upon the prevailing concept of God was to be expected; the Classical view of God was inimical to the Romantic spirit.
As beauty could no longer be found in art which expressed a societal view of morality, the aesthetics of the 19th century concentrated upon what made the particular artistic expression beau¼tiful. The idealist Augustan belief, that beauty was found in art that pointed to moral order, was discarded, and beauty came to be perceived as existing in the individual's response to the art object. But science did not partake of this aesthetic revolution during the 19th century, and, with one important exception, has still not shifted its philosophical viewpoint. Science was, and still is in general, committed to a mechanistic, non-personal philosophy. It believes in the order of Nature, and in the reality that can be understood by experimentation upon Nature.

Huxley (1869), introducing the opening number of Nature in 1869 revealed the stance of 19th century (and 20th century) science, when he defined science as "the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of a man". To science the reality of Nature imposes its own "picture" upon the mind, and, as the individual personality plays no part in what constitutes this reality, there can be only one form of Nature common to the understanding of all men. For Huxley (1868), "that man ... has had a liberal education ... whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order." Who can deny the crudi¼ty of this identification of science with the triumphs of technology?
What a far cry are Huxley's statements from those of Wordsworth (1798) some seventy years previously, when he so aptly summed the Romantic approach to Nature in his famous lines:
" And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things"
Tintern Abbey, 1798
Thus, the Romantic Revolution hardened the commitment of science to the mechanistic tradition. It may be arguable that science could have chosen to follow the 19th century aesthetic spirit and have cast itself in a Romantic mode; indeed such modern philosophers of science as Feuerabend (1978) claim that it should make this transition now; but a new and developing connection precluded such a choice being made. For, as the Industrial Revolution progressed, there grew rapidly an ever ex¼panding interdependency of science and technology (Musson and Robinson 1969).

Although many of the earlier inventions and discoveries of the Industrial Revolution were basically "seat-of-the-pants" in style, during the 19th century the scientist and the technologist in¼creasingly cooperated. The full flowering of such cooperation is obvious in the modern industri¼alised state. I have distinguished between scientist and technologist, for during the 19th century, but decreasingly during this century, such a distinction could be made. Whereas the scientist, like his forebears, studied Nature to see how it worked, the technologist used the knowledge of how Nature works to change such workings towards desired industrial goals.
Herein lies the origin of the great divorce. 19th Century aesthetics, coupled to Romanticism, was based on a philosophy of the importance of the individual and of the personal understanding of beauty and truth. On the other hand 19th century science, coupled to technology, was divorced from the artistic/aesthetic movement of the age and became conjoined with the work-a-day world of the mechanic turned technologist.
C.P. Snow (1959) became famous, at least in part, for his championing of the concept of the western world's Two Cultures. His cultures derive, as we have seen, from the divorce between Classical science and Romantic aesthetics; a divorce that Snow sees as springing from the very dif¼ferent educational backgrounds of the Scientist and the Artist.
 
FORM AND SYMBOL IN ART AND SCIENCE

Form and symbol are concepts which the historian of art and aesthetics uses when analysing works of art (Kubler 1962). The concepts are not always readily separable in art, because the unity of work can make such arbitary, critical constructs meaningless. Nevertheless, because generalised concepts are essential for any verbal discussion, the terms have found wide acceptance.

Form is the technique and the materials used in the work of art. The "formal" way in which materials are used to express shapes and relationships; the functional method whereby meaning and feeling are imparted to the work.

Symbol is the meaning and feeling in the work. The perspective of reality offered and created by the form that has been used.
Kubler (1962) claims that Cassirer's definition of art as being "symbolic language" has domi¼nated modern art studies; the Romantic aesthetic has dealt with symbolic meaning as distinct from Classical form. It is of very great interest to note that while aesthetics has dwelt upon symbol, science and technology have increasingly concentrated upon form to the exclusion of symbolic meaning. As Eliot (1934) pointed out nearly half a century ago, there was no meaning for science and technology within the then current aesthetic ethos.
" The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness, Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, no nearer to God"
from Choruses from `The Rock" 1934
In the aftermath of Romanticism, Western man began to look at Nature with the Romantic precept of seeing beauty with his own eyes. What he saw was Nature transformed by industrializa¼tion, and like that great prophet William Blake he disliked the "dark Satanic mills" of the trans¼formation.
 
REFERENCES
BLAKE, William, Milton (preface). BOYLE, R., 1772. Works, Vol. 1, p. 167. CARDWELL, D.S.L., 1973. Technology, Science & History, Heinemann. CALINESCU, M., 1977. Faces of Modernity, Indiana Univ. Press. ELIOT, T.S., 1922. The Waste Land, Faber & Faber.
ELIOT, T.S., 1934. Choruses from `The Rock', Faber & Faber. FEYERABEND, P., 1978. Science in a Free Society, New Left Books. GILBERT, K.E. and KUHN, H., 1953. A History of Aesthetics, Dover. HUXLEY, T.H., 1868. A Liberal Education, see Science & Education, undated, p. 80. HUXLEY, T.H., 1869. Nature, Vol. 1, see The Popular Science Monthly, 1872, pp. 113-115. JOHNSON, S., 1759. Rasselas, Oxford, 1927.
KUBLER, G., 1962. The Shape of Time, Yale Univ. Press.
MUSSON, A.E. and ROBINSON, E., 1969. Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester Univ. Press.
POPE, A., (date unknown), Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, quoted in Penguin Book of English Verse, 1956.
REYNOLDS, J., 1769. Discourses, Dent.
SCHLEIERMACHER, F., 1821. On Religion, trans. T.N. Tice, John Knox Press, 1969, p. 55. SCHOPENHAUER, A., 1819. The World as Will and Idea, trans. Haldane and Kemp, 8th Edn., 1937. SNOW, C.P., 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge Univ. Press. VAUGHAN, W., 1978. Romantic Art, Thames and Hudson, London.
WORDSWORTH, W., 1798. Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.
 
 
 
 
4. THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY
Dr. J.E.O Hagan, Research Scientist and Public Relations Consultant; Hon. Secretary, Queensland Division, ANZAAS, Principal, John E. O'Hagan, Public Relations Consultancy.

ABSTRACT
Compared with the vast scientific literature published, there are but few records of the emotional experiences of scientists related to their discoveries.
Examination of the available reports however, mainly in biographies and letters, re¼veals the often great ecstatic responses on the making of, or confirmation of, new discover¼ies, amounting to a state not unlike that attained in some recorded religious experiences.
There appear to be an even less number of reports on the feelings of artists about their work. Perhaps they are content to have it revealed in the work itself, which relies so much on emotional response. Technologists appear to be even more reticent in sharing their responses.
However the available evidence reveals a common bond between all three practitioners of intense feeling about their work which could form a basis for mutual appreciation and co-operation.

" EUREKA! EUREKA!!" - "I've found it! I've got it!!" To discover - to behold the new, to be where no one has been before, to find enlightenment where there has been darkness - is one of the most overwhelmingly satisfying experiences a human can enjoy.
Archimedes, the celebrated physicist and mathematician of Ancient Greece, had been commis¼sioned by King Hieron II to report on his new elaborate crown which he had ordered to be fashioned of pure gold. Hieron suspected the metal was a gold-silver alloy but how could this be proved?
Archimedes must have pondered at length on the problem. He knew the alloy, if such it was, would have a different specific gravity from pure gold, but how could he calculate this without melting the crown and casting to a shape of regular geometric form to determine the volume?
He was musing on this problem as he went to the public baths. Lying in the water, he suddenly realised the significance of the rise in the level of the water in the bath - it represented the in¼creased volume of the contents due to his submerged body. He could find the volume of the intri¼cate crown in the same way!!
Without concern for clothing, Archimedes is reported to have rushed home from the baths shouting - "EUREKA! EUREKA!!", no doubt to try an experiment to test his hypothesis. The metal in the crown turned out to be an alloy and the jeweller was executed, sad to say.

Hieron II is little remembered, but every schoolchild on first encounter with science will ob¼serve the experiment of Archimedes using an irregular body suspended in water, and deduce his Principle of Buoyancy - that a body immersed in a fluid loses as much weight as the weight of fluid displaced.
Not only is this the first record of non-destructive scientific analysis, so common today, but also the first of innumerable times when science has come to the aid of the law and of art in detecting falsehood.

But to get back to Archimedes - his most powerful emotions of surprise and delight at his solution of the problem completely overruled his other natural reaction to cover his body.
Such detachment is, of course, not confined to scientists. The novelist J.B. Priestley expresses it so succinctly in his book "Delight" -
" The coming of the Idea. There is nothing piecemeal about its arrival. It comes as the ancient gods and goddesses must have manifested themselves to their more fortunate worshippers. (And indeed it comes from the same place.) At one moment the mind knows it not. The next it is there, taking full possession of the mind, which quivers in ecstatic surrender. - Lord, let me live to welcome again with all the old abandon, not knowing whether I am dressing or undressing, whether it is Tuesday morning or Friday evening, the sunburst of the Idea!"

And apparently Priestley concurred with Albert Einstein's statement that - "All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree."
In the scientific literature as we generally know it, it is impossible to find evidence of the emotional responses of the discoverer; he and his editors carefully eliminate them. This is quite proper, since scientific results should rest on knowledge, not feelings. So we have to go to biogra¼phies and letters of scientists to find evidence of the excitement of discovery. Thus Einstein - mistakenly thought by many to have been cold and impersonal - having waited for many long
years for tangible proof of his theory expressed his suppressed emotions when other scientists found that refined measurements of the motion of the Planet Mercury confirmed his mathematics. He wrote, according to Hoffman, -
" But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alterna¼tions of confidence and exhaustion, and the final emergence into the light - only those who have themselves experienced it can understand that."

To his friend Paul Ehrenfest he wrote -
" Imagine my joy at the feasibility of the general covariance and at the result that the equations yield the correct perihelion motion of Mercury. I was beside myself with ecstacy for days."

Perhaps no wonder - he had succeeded the immortal Isaac Newton! Some of this excitement of new discovery is conveyed by Bickel's report of the first experimental use of penicillin, purified by the biochemist Ernst Chain and injected into white mice previously infected with haemolytic streptococci, of the type which causes childbirth fever and death.
" On the Sunday morning Florey stood in the laboratory with the evidence of success be¼fore him. Four white mice lay still and dead in the bottom of the cage. The other four were still living, and only one, which had had a single, minute injection, looked unwell. - Florey was joined by his two colleagues. Chain was thrilled and almost dancing with excitement;"
Edward Derrick, whose work led to the founding of the Queensland Institute of Medical Re¼search, sought assistance from Macfarlane Burnet in identifying an organism causing a typhoid-like illness in abattoir workers in Brisbane. Derrick had developed a technique for specific diagnosis of the-disease by studying the immunological response of guinea-pigs injected with blood from the patient, but had not characterised the infecting organism. Burnet injected mice with the organism and sectioned and stained their spleens. Sections, according to Burnet -
" to our imense pleasure contained large numbers of tiny rods staining in the typical fashion of rickettsias. There was no shadow of doubt: we had identified the agent of `abattoirs fever'. Derrick and I were both delighted - "
As well they might, since the disease was a widely-spread one throughout the world and here was the knowledge to diagnose, and suggest treatment for it. It is commonly referred to as Q fever. Louis Pasteur wrote, according to Vallery-Radot, -
" When you have at last arrived at certainty, your joy is one of the greatest that can be felt by a human soul."
Eve Curie related her mother's description of the parent's visit to their dingy laboratory after the children had been put to bed -
" "Don't light the lamps!" Marie said in the darkness. Then she added with a little laugh: Do you remember the day you said to me: "I should like radium to have a beautiful colour?"
The reality was more entrancing than the simple wish of long ago. Radium had some¼thing better than "a beautiful colour": it was spontaneously luminous. And in the sombre shed, where, in the absence of cupboards, the precious particles in their tiny glass receivers were placed on tables or on shelves nailed to the wall, their phosphorescent bluish outlines gleamed, suspended in the night.
" Look ... Look!" the young woman murmured. - Their two faces turned towards the pale glimmering the mysterious sources of radiation, towards radium - their radium. - She was to remember forever this evening of glow-worms, this magic."

Charles Darwin had an experience of enlightenment of similar impact -
" I can remember the very spot on the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me."
Peter Kropotkin also expressed this feeling of transcendence -
" He who has once in his life experienced this joy of scientific creation will never forget it."
An when the desired successful experiment or the required inspiration does not come, the scientist can experience similar emotional feelings of despair to what St. John of the Cross referred, in a religious context, as "the dark night of the soul". But when the desired results flow, the soul is back in grace and as Claude Bernard tell us -
" The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel."

I have dealt mainly with scientists in this discussion, but I am sure these feelings are shared by artists and technologists as well. My literature search, although by no means a complete one, re¼vealed that they seem less inclined to express their feelings in writing. Artsitic expression is that of the emotions anyway, and perhaps artists are happy just to have their joy expressed in their work. Technologists are "doers" rather than writers, and perhaps they are content to convey their thrils by having their work "shine in use".
All three groups are capable of much more intense concentration on their activities than the public at large, and this I believe, is partly why they would appear to have much greater rewards emotionally. But is this all they share, and is this not a reason why they should engage in more mutual appreciation? Perhaps there is more.
C.P. Snow, a scientist as well as a creative writer, in his novel "The Search", describes the emotions of a physical chemist when his results were confirmed by another -
" Then I was carried beyond pleasure ... as though all the world, the atoms and the stars, were wonderfully close to me, and I to them, so that we were part of a lucidity more closer than any mystery.

I had never known such a moment could exist. ... Since then I have never quite re¼gained it. But one effect will stay with me as long as I live; once, when I was young, I used to sneer at the mystics who have described the experience of being one with God and part of the unity of things. After that afternoon, I did not want to laugh again; for al¼though I should have interpreted the experience differently, I thought I knew what they meant."
We need both the scientist and the artist to describe this Oneness, this Unity. Newton's Principle of Universal Gravitation - "Every particle of matter in the Universe is attracted to every other particle of matter with a force inversely proportional to the square of their distances" - beautiful though it is, needs Francis Thompson's poetry to complement and extend it -
" All things by imortal power, Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star;"
And Newton would not have been able to make his observations without the help of technolo¼gists to prepare the materials for his instruments!
Long before Newton, during the Middle Ages when science and technology were still classed as "art", and Leonardo could practice in all three, St. Francis of Assisi made this statement -
" He who works with his hands is a labourer,
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman,
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."
We should all aspire to be "artists" of one form or another, and having experienced the thrill of discovery ourselves, may also be able to shout - "Eureka! Eureka!!"
 
REFERENCES
ASIMOV, I., 1978. Asimov's Biographical Encylopedia of Science and Technology. (David and Charles: Lon¼don).
BERNARD, C., 1865. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (English translation). 1927. (Macmillan: New York).
BICKEL, L., 1972. Rise Up to Life. (Angus and Robertson: Sydney).
BURNET, M., 1968. Changing Patterns: an Atypical Autobiography. (Sun: Melbourne). CURIE, E., 1938. Marie Curie. Translated by V. Sheean. (Heinemann: London). DARWIN, F., 1888. Life and Letters of C. Darwin. (John Murray: London).
EINSTEIN, A., 1950. "Moral Decay", in Out of My Later Years. (Philosophical Library: New York). FRANCIS OF ASSISI, St. n.d. Quoted by J. Burton in Glass; Philosophy and Method. 1969. (Pitman: Lon¼don).
HOFFMANN, B., 1973. Albert Einstein Creator and Rebel. With the collaboration of H. Dukas. (Hart-Davis, MacGibbon: London).
KROPOTKIN, P., n.d. Quoted by W.I.B. Beveridge in The Art of Scientific Investigation. 1961. (Vintage: New • York).
PRIESTLEY, J.B., 1949. Delight. (Heinemann: Melbourne). SNOW, C.P., 1958. The Search. (Macmillan: London). THOMPSON, F., 1937. Part of "The Mistress of Vision" in The Poems of Francis Thompson. (Oxford: Lon¼don).
VALLERY-RADOT, R., 1948. Life of Pasteur. (Constable: London).
I am grateful to the above-mentioned publishers for permission to reproduce material from their books.

 
5. Opening and viewing of Display ART IN SCIENCE AND SCIENCE IN ART su¼pervised by Mr. Nigel Sabine, Curator, Civic Art Gallery and Musium, Li¼brary, City Hall.
Presentation of artwork to Civic Art Gallery and Museum.

 
Session III Technology


1. Computer Controlled Electronic Musical Instruments demonstrated by Mr. Colin Timms, Tutor in Recording Techniques and Electronic Music, Queens¼land Conservatorium of Music.
2. "IS DESIGN ART?" - Mr Michael Bryce, Architect and Graphic Designer; Principal, Bryce Design Consultants, Federal President, Design Institute of Australia.

PREAMBLE
My contribution to today's symposium falls within the section on Technology and I would like you to see the irony of this when I will be attempting to explode a myth that is held to the bosom of every 'young' designer graduate - at least in my spectrum of knowledge.
I am here at the invitation of your Scientific Convenor, Dr. John O'Hagan, with whom I have had several interesting discussions on the interface between art and technolo¼gy¼
It has led me to the terrible realisation that my past 20 years of practice as a designer, during which I have strenuously denied the existence of anything as bourgeois as ART in my design philosophy, have been a lie.
I stand here - a born again artist!
But unless you take this too literally, I will explain my realisation in a more sequential
way.

A definition of 'art' and 'design' cannot be attempted without an analysis of past and present values, perceptions and lifestyles; the influence of major art movements and the realities of an industrialised society.
There is a viewpoint that design is the logical pregression from primitive expressionism or 'art'; that the prevalence of artistic expression for its own sake has given way to functionalism; that design is art made functional.
In a consumer society it would be difficult to ignore the influence of the marketplace. Both art and design are treated as commodities for sale. The relationship between art and design, once dis¼tanced, has reached a point of convergence. Traditional definitions of art which once only acknowl¼edged the stereotype (paintings, sculpture etc.) now acknowledges the machine age. Automobiles, home appliances, and tools, may now be seen as art forms. At the same time, items that were once purely designed for a function are now being used as vehicles for artistic expression.
Firstly, by defining design and then by looking for the art in it and by a few illustrations proposing that there is a very shaky road to design through art, but a firmer road to art through design.
This will mean a few definitions.

Sir Misha Black, Head of the Royal College of Art, arguably Britain's foremost design school, and a lifetime advocate of function over form said in 1970 (Black, 1970).
" All objects contain formal or aesthetic qualities. This is obvious enough in the craft-based industries. In the ancient crafts of ceramics, textile weaving and printing, glass blowing and so on, the relationship between aesthetics and production is as old as the history of man. The new element which causes much argument and some confusion, is the relationship of aesthetics or art to the products of the light and heavy engineering industries - To the design of a television set or radar electronic equipment, electrical sub-stations and sewing machines, refrigerators and machine tools."
Black, himself an architect, lashed back at that tenet of engineers. Form inexorably follows function, and thus a solely scientific or technological approach to engineering produces forms which are visually so satisfactory as to eliminate the need for conscious aesthetic endeavour.
This he counters with the argument that society is filled with useful objects which far from being aesthetically pleasing actually destroy the "pleasures of city life" and set too low standards for the developing countries.

The late Oscar Faber said in 1944 (in a paper delivered to the British Institution of Civil Engi¼neers) (Black, 1970).
" The fallacy, which is very widely held, is that if a structure is honestly designed to satisfy all its scientific or engineering requirements it will of necessity be beautiful ... all I can say is that I wish it were true, because most engineers can design a structure scientifically with a constant factor of safety in all its component parts, and if that were a guarantee that the result would be beautiful, the problem would indeed be a simple one. Unfortunately, all that one can say about it is that such
a structure may by chance be beautiful, but it will only be by chance".

I shall not bore you with a historical dissertation. It is enough to say that industrial design as it exists today springs from two sources. The first is the Arts and Crafts movement of the past centu¼ry based on the theory and practice of William Morris in the second half of the 19th century. This led eventually to the establishment of the Bauhaus in Germany in 1919; the influence of that great school still reverberates throughout the world.

The second source is a group of American designers (Black, 1970, p.37) who, in the great slump of the later 1920s, demonstrated that industrial design could be a major factor in increasing the sales of specific products even in an economic situation when total sales were catastrophically reduced. Today industrial design is an established profession on an international basis. The Interna¼tional Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) federates 50 societies and councils of industrial design in 32 countries, from USA to Japan, the USSR to Great Britain, Norway to Czechoslovakia, Argentina to Australia. The federated societies have 12,000 members of which 8,¼000 are professional designers.
The ICSID definition states:
" Industrial design is a creative activity whose aim is to determine the formal qualities of ob¼jects produced by industry. These formal qualities are not only the external features but principally those structural and functional relationships which convert a system to a coherent unity both from the point of view of the producer and the user."
There are many other definitions such as:
" Industrial design is the design of artifacts intended for production by industrial processes and in which the aesthetic and other human factors play a significant role".
In Australia, Design is seen to cover the broad spectrum of made to useful objects, fashion design being one of the more desirous claimants. It is the Design leader, but interior and exhibition design and graphic design are obvious contenders.
The highly technical pursuit of Imagery, in the form of film, television and theatre design, are also seen as broadly subjective and art based.
Products and machinery such as motor vehicles and appliances easily fit the Bill as Design in the technological sense.
The Design Institute of Australia defines 3 major categories of Designer. These are: Graphic
Product (or industrial), and Interior

Within each of these headings, there are vast ranges of differences in the objective or function¼al response and the subjective or decorative response.
Some would say that it is possible to grade the level of design in a progressive "Monkey to Man" - scale.
Were this true - it would make life for the designer a lot simpler.
" You want a product so you get a solution! Never mind fashion, the marketplace, packaging, cost, consumer persuasions, value judgments, corporate personality and so on.
The fact is that each object has a variable degree of creative and problem solving decisions. Take for example a simple spoon may be treated as an art form with the most simple function, to scoop.

Or it can be highly tooled to make an ergonomic solution fitting the hand, the mouth and the content.
Thus a spoon can take many forms and still work as a spoon.
On the other hand a Camera must express many complex functions as concisely and objectively as possible - its form follows its function.
Obviously, the more aesthetic and sensory latitude available within a particular range of design opportunities, the closer they resemble those offered by the practice of "fine-art". The less latitude, the closer design becomes to the sciences, and to fields in which the margin of aesthetic "choice" is truly marginal. The design of a traffic light system has an aesthetic component, but it would need a very special definition of aesthetics to embrace the many determining factors that must finally settle the design outcome.
That there is a relationship between this form and art is the point I will make further on.
A definition of Art cannot be attempted without an analysis of past and present values, per¼ceptions and changing social patterns.
But let me highlight some of the major influences on design.
The Flemish School of Painting in the C12-13 perfected technical drafting (Lampitt, 1972).
In this movement, attention to proportion and true perspective assumed a large proportion of the art. Textures and lighting drew attention to fabric and form.
Interiors were related to the frame of the painting. In A Portrait of Jan Arnolfini & His Wife by Van Eyck. The viewer was taken into an interior and shown a lifestyle. Products were seen as worthy of atmosphere.

Baroque and Romantic movements gave way to the Impressionists of the late 19th Century (Monet, Degas, Cezanne).
Here the romance and the allegory were stripped away and common sense and stimulation were used.
Objects were put before us, not as copies of reality, but as thought provokers. Visual perception, colour theories and imagery stretched the imagination.
The shock of Cubism was to be matched by the beginning of the modern design movement in which functionalism was to lineage as an art form.
By the early 20th Century, Abstractism had reached its zenith, Wassely, Kandinsky and Mon¼drian, made abstractions of patterns that had remarkable similarity to emerging architecture, while Klee and Chagall placed individualism above tradition.
It was at this time that the influence of Bauhaus that product of 1'920 Werkbund Germany in the pre-war period that established t