![]() No less important than these details, however, some of which I will show you presently, was the light this realization in turn shed on another heretofore unposed, let alone unanswered question, namely, why was Leonardo so inordinately obsessed with water in the first place? Of course, Leonardo was fascinated by virtually everything he saw, and it could be argued that, speaking relatively, perhaps even absolutely, he saw a great deal more than anyone else either before or since. In fact, stunning parallels can be found among Leonardo’s studies of water and hydrodynamics, not for just one or two points, but for practically every detail of Wightman's account. His presentation struck me, as an art historian, like a bolt of lightning because it gave me a completely new sense-insight, I like to think-into what might be described as one of the major categories of the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. ![]() ![]() 2: Leonardo da Vinci, plan for straightening the Arno, ca. The scientist then spoke of catastrophe, turbulence, and predictability-all of which I, as an art historian used to thinking in biblical and Christian eschatological terms, translated mentally into the term "chaos," which, as far as I can recall, Professor Wightman did not then use.įig. The problem of interest to the scientist was to try to push back (or forward) as far as possible the moment of catastrophe, reducing to a minimum the limit of predictability. The flow of water becomes unpredictable at the moment of what he called catastrophe. The pattern of ripples caused by the obstacle develops and changes according to certain regular, mathematically definable rules, up to a certain point, literally an instant in time, after which the water becomes turbulent in the specific sense that it can no longer be described mathematically. In order to explain the subject to the laymen amongst us he gave the example of an object, like a stick placed in a stream of flowing water whose velocity is gradually increasing. Wightman spoke about the new and interesting studies of what he called catastrophe theory-that was the first time I had heard the phrase. Nothing ever came of the publication project the organizer of the meeting envisaged, but I was left scarred forever by the presentation of one of the participants in that little game of intellectual show and tell, the late Arthur Wightman, professor of mathematical physics at Princeton University. Shortly after I came to Princeton in the fall of 1974 I was invited to join a small group of people from a variety of fields in giving some account of what was new-recent developments and promising directions for future research-in our respective disciplines. In order to explain my idea it seems appropriate to tell you how my interest in the subject came about. This essay was first presented in Italian in a dialogue with the physicist Tullio Regge, former Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, as the fifth episode in a television series “Dietro lo Specchio,” broadcast by RAI 2, in Turin, Italy, October 21, 1981.
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