Newton: Scientist Become Artist

[coberst]

Newton: Scientist Become Artist

Perception of Effect versus Conception of Form

Living on the surface of the onion (reality) is to be guided by the effect of perception; peeling off the surface of the onion (reality) is to be guided by the form of realty.

Newton, perceiving the falling apple (mythical), expanded his world of reality by conceiving the form that made such a thing possible. From the concept of the form he then developed the math, i.e. differential calculus, which made it possible to follow the pattern of the form, thereby making the prediction of future patterns of form all the way to placing a “man on the moon”.

Newton began as the scientist, and then became artist, of Mother Nature in action. The scientist conceived the form of gravity and then the artist communicated that form via the medium of mathematics to the rest of humanity. Newton made concrete the abstract form via the medium of mathematics.

“The tendency toward simplest shapes…governs the activities of the organism at so basic a physiological and psychological level that the country or historical period from which we take our human examples makes little difference.” In other words, human perception is like the perception of our biologically closest animal organisms; when we deal with our fundamental human perception system we are dealing with the hand that Mother Nature has dealt us in our animal nature.

To comprehend the basics of biological visual perception of organisms in general is to understand the foundation of human cognition.

“The formation of representational concepts [i.e. artful concepts], more than anything else, distinguishes the artist from the nonartist…The artist’s privilege is the capacity to apprehend the nature and meaning of an experience in the terms of a given medium, and thus to make it tangible. The nonartist is left “speechless” by the fruits of his sensitive wisdom. He cannot give them adequate material form. He can express himself, more or less articulately, but not his experience. During the moments in which a human being is an artist, he finds shape for bodiless structure of what he has felt.”

Newton developed a new mathematical form in order to express, as the artist, the insight he gained as a scientist.