On Monday, December 9, IFF Director Margaret Wertheim will give a talk at the Newcastle Museum in Australia in conjunction with the Model and Metaphor conference being held at the University of Newcastle. The conference is convened to consider the role that the arts can and might play in advancing both scientific literacy and, potentially, scientific research. Margaret’s talk on the Monday night, precedes the conference and is open to the public. [See above link for details.]
Entitled Concepts of Space: How Artists Paved the Way for Physicists at the Dawn of the Scientific Revolution, Margaret’s talk will consider the history of perspectival representation and how this form of artistic expression set up the conditions for the acceptance of a Euclidean concept of space in the early seventeenth century. Here, Wertheim will argue, artists from Giotto to Raphael paved the way for the new physics championed by Descartes, Galileo and Newton.
On Tuesday, December 10, artists, scientists and other critical thinkers will gather at Newcastle University for a one-day symposium to reflect on contemporary and future relations between the arts and sciences. Conference speakers include Dr. Jill Scott, Dr. Nola Farman, and Stellarc.