Chaos imagined : literature, art, science
(Book)

To the physicist, "order" is the ability to predict--and "chaos" (or "disorder") the inability to predict--events or perceptions in neighboring space/time. Meisel (emer., dramatic literature, Columbia) attempts to explain the concept of disorder in the physical sciences and then apply it to literature and the arts from classical to modern times. For example, he sees the rise of chaos out of the order of the Newtonian worldview in Haydn's Creation (1798) and Stern's Tristram Shandy (1761). Intending to represent "chaos in literature or art," the author writes that "it is the artist who has to take most seriously the obligation of making chaos concrete." He goes on to say that "with perfect order as with unrelieved chaos, there is a resistance that makes itself felt not only in the realm of experience but in the workshop of the imagination." The physicist shows no such resistance, substituting probabilities for certainties when moving from order to chaos. As Meisel demonstrates, the artist's job is much harder since he intends "to reverse the usual perspective and treat order as background." This challenging book is a model of complexity, requiring an enormous vocabulary from both the arts and science. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Alvin M. Saperstein, Wayne State University

Lay readers may find the style of this ambitious multidisciplinary work overly academic, but those who patiently soldier through the dense prose are likely to find the journey worthwhile. Meisel, a theater professor at Columbia University, brilliantly integrates two distinct areas of study: recent scientific conclusions about the limits of human knowledge and whether there is an order to the universe, and how artists, poets, philosophers, and writers "have attempted to give shape to the imagination of chaos." An opening section on the history of science is particularly effective, explaining how even fields assumed to be firmly grounded in provable ideas, such as mathematics, are not; Meisel makes palpable the "sometimes poignant expressions of unease among scientists and mathematicians" about the "sustainability of the claims of science to objectivity and precision." He then takes readers on a fascinating survey of humanity's questioning of "whether we live in a universe of laws," in which he includes Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's King Lear, and the artwork of Pablo Picasso. The text is enhanced by reproductions of works by Alberto Giacometti, J.M.W. Turner, and Francisco Goya, among others that offer different perspectives on whether the illumination provided by human knowledge will disclose the secrets of the universe or merely emphasize the surrounding darkness. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Lay readers may find the style of this ambitious multidisciplinary work overly academic, but those who patiently soldier through the dense prose are likely to find the journey worthwhile. Meisel, a theater professor at Columbia University, brilliantly integrates two distinct areas of study: recent scientific conclusions about the limits of human knowledge and whether there is an order to the universe, and how artists, poets, philosophers, and writers "have attempted to give shape to the imagination of chaos." An opening section on the history of science is particularly effective, explaining how even fields assumed to be firmly grounded in provable ideas, such as mathematics, are not; Meisel makes palpable the "sometimes poignant expressions of unease among scientists and mathematicians" about the "sustainability of the claims of science to objectivity and precision." He then takes readers on a fascinating survey of humanity's questioning of "whether we live in a universe of laws," in which he includes Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's King Lear, and the artwork of Pablo Picasso. The text is enhanced by reproductions of works by Alberto Giacometti, J.M.W. Turner, and Francisco Goya, among others that offer different perspectives on whether the illumination provided by human knowledge will disclose the secrets of the universe or merely emphasize the surrounding darkness. (Jan.)