Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity in Art and Science

Among the most disorienting intellectual developments of the 20th century were quantum mechanics and abstract painting. The new physics destroyed commonsense notions of causality and threatened to resurrect the shunned idea of action at a distance; meanwhile, schools of nonmimetic art questioned, as did the new science, the meaning of observation itself. Physicist Bohm, a familiar of Einstein, struggled to interpret the paradoxical new findings in a way that would preserve the integrity of the basic classical understanding, while Biederman, in his paintings and manifestos of ""constructivist art,"" sought to ""extentionalize"" traditional canons. Although large parts of the pair's letters are of such extreme abstraction and detail as to interest only academics, much else in their correspondence, edited here by Bohm's colleague Pylkkanen, is passionate and stimulating, as scientist and artist discover, each in the other's field, deep implications for his own, especially regarding human creativity within nature. Crystallized in this volume, the first of a series comprising the 4000 pages of the principals' correspondence between 1960 and 1969, is the spirit of an age struggling to understand itself. Biederman is sometimes cranky--bitter, for example, about the ""clown"" Picasso and about the Surrealist school, which he sees as fascist--but always the ardent intellectual explorer. Bohm is the patient teacher, humble, rigorous, cutting deeply beyond newspaper notions of the new science to examine the logical roots of our worldview. They revel in each other's inquiring spirit, and readers can only revel in their adventure. A useful set of summaries of the letters is appended. (Mar.)