American Light: The Luminisi Movement, 1850–1875. Paintings, Drawings, Photographs (review)

240 Books decide whether Snelson’s models are beautiful, or stimulating, or thought-provoking. What about the written arguments in the catalog? We learn that Snelson tries to do much more in this work than just create art: he takes his vision of the atom quite seriously as a scientific advance. He claims that the riddle of the atom has ‘not yet [been] solved convincingly by science’, (p, 2) and feels that he has a contribution to make:. .. it may be that artists are the last of the speculative philosophers ...even though this territory is rejected by science, it remains the place we might one day find out what an atom would be like ...’ (p. 3). He hopes that his artistic vision may contributeto our understanding of the atom. The exhibition is a turning into art of his understanding of quantum mechanics. His claim is that ‘The features of my picture come close to those we should expect of an atom ... in order to see it as a workable device capable of doing all those remarkable things an atom is able to do’ (p. 4). Unfortunately, Snelson’s understanding of the physics of the atom. of quantum mechanics. is wrong enough that his is not, indeed, a working model. Many of his statements are in direct contradiction with experiment and known natural law-in short, they are unacceptable. For example, he does not know that angular momentum is a product of the mass, the speed, and the orbital radius, so that if an electron with constant speed were to go into a smaller orbit, it would have a smaller angular momentum, not a larger one as he claims (p. 12). Since the catalog deals more with his speculations on atomic structure than with the sculpture itself, the invalidity of these conjectures represents a serious flaw in the booklet. Good art can of course emerge from the stimulation of misunderstood science. But then Snelson’s sculptures should stand on their merit as art. and not on any pretensions of either interpreting or advancing science. We are left wishing that the artist had indeed accepted his own advice that ‘My new model . _ _ if it turns out to have nothing to do with real atoms,then it is simply an incredible invention of the mind’ (p. 4). It is too bad that no more of the resulting inventions-the sculptures-are shown in enough detail to let us judge whether they are indeed (artistically) incredible. Many of Snelson’s previous sculptures are artistic successes. This exhibition is not a contribution to science. Unfortunately we cannot tell to what extent it is an artistic achievement. Could we have an artistic catalog. please’? Brains, Machines and Persons. Donald M. MacKay. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. Michigan. 1980. I I4 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 0-8028-1817-X. Reviewed by Peter Kugel’ In this slim and charming book, MacKay asks an important question: ‘What would it do to our religious and ethical ideas about human beings if we succeeded in developing a complete mechanical account of the mind?’ He concludes that. far from destroying these ideas. it would ‘amplify, deepen, add new dimensions to our wonder. our hope and our respect and cornpatsion for one another and our responsibilities to one another.’ In the course of arguingto this conclusion, MacKay gives a clear but solid characterization of today’s work toward such an account in both the neurosciences and artificial intelligence. (There are a few minor errors, as when he says that Turing ‘provedin effect that any logical task that is precisely specifiable can in principle be performed (by a computer).’Turing did not prove this. He only proposed it and argued for it.) The reader looking for a general description of work on the structure of the mind would be well advised to look here. But, although most of the book is devoted to describingcurrent work on brains and machines, its main purpose is to show how this work relates to our concept of the person. Mackay’s view, which he calls ‘Comprehensive Realism’, offers an alternative to the two most popular views of the mind: Materialism, which claims that mind is merely matter, and...