156 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
begin to respect them, as methods of confronting the cosmos, which are
equivalent to our own. There is a Chinese perspective, which is just as
justified as the Western one.
Another thinker, Paul Squires, saw in Einsteinian relativity support
for the notion of Gestalt psychology. He likens traditional psychology to
Newtonian physics and Gestalt psychology to Einsteinian physics. He
wrote,
For the traditional psychology, particular experiences and
bouts of behaviour possess a more or less absolute character.
For the Gestalt psychologist, any aspect of mentality has
meaning only in its relation to the larger context, the whole, in
which it exists.The art critic, Thomas Craven, in an article written in 1921, claimed
that Einstein’s ideas support the position of the modern artists. He wrote,
While the celebrated physicist has been evolving his shocking
theories of the course of natural phenomena, the world of art
has suffered an equivalent heterodoxy with respect to its
expressive media. This revolt has sprung from conviction that
the old art is not necessarily infallible, and that equally
significant achievements may be reached by new processes and
by fresh sources of inspiration.Craven regards the rigidity of “the old art” as corresponding to the
“immovable reference-body” of Newtonian physics. He claims just as
Einstein’s theory changed Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time
“similarly has the modern painter broken the classical tradition.” Rather
than clinging to the rigid laws of photographic vision, he claims that the
artist injects his own “personal feeling”. Instead of arriving at an absolute
truth “which serves all purposes of illustration” but “reveals nothing
psychologically”, artists achieve a greater truth, a psychological truth,
relative to themselves.