Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art

How can new knowledge be created from already existing knowledge? Insights of Genius shows how seeing is central to the greatest advances of the human intellect. Artists and scientists alike rely on visual representations of worlds both visible and invisible. Insights of Genius, first published by Copernicus in 1996, explores the creative leaps that led some of the greatest scientists and artists to dramatically transform how we understand nature. The scope of figures runs from Galileo and da Vinci to Einstein and Picasso. Focusing on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the age of modern art and modern physics, the book travels through the philosophy of mind and language, cognitive science, neurophysiology, and art history. Insights of Genius discusses intuition, aesthetics, realism, representation, metaphors, and visual imagery. Allied to these concepts are causality, relativity, energy conservation, entropy, the correspondence principle, scientific creativity, and Cubism. Running through the book is the idea that science extends our intuition from common sense to an understanding of a world beyond our perception.