Leonard Shlain wrote a fascinating and, I think, profound and prophetic book entitled, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. He worked on this book for a decade. He is neither an artist nor a physicist, he is a surgeon and, in my view, a creative interdisciplinary scholar. He noticed that "(R)evolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality." His thesis is that revolutionary art prefigures new understandings in physics. The art embodies radical innovations that have yet to be articulated in physics, but that will change our understanding of reality.

I am not a revolutionary artist and certainly not a physicist, visionary or otherwise, but I am an interdisciplinary learner. For me so much of the joy of looking at things in an interdisciplinary way is the possibility of making new associations, creative connections that birth new forms. All of my academic work was one way to explore connections between art and science. More recently doing a series of paintings on concepts in New Science has been another. And though I have gotten support for my need to integrate these two seemingly irreconcilable fields, I have also often met with puzzlement about that endeavor.

I am proud of my New Sciences Series. I loved doing these paintings. I imagined who might love these works; a scientist with an eye for the aesthetic, someone who likes visual puns, someone who could surrender to the magic of an interdisciplinary ..."Merlinesque"... moment. This painting, "Broken Symmetry" was inspired (and named) by just such a person. You never know when a fortunate collaboration might happen. It's good to be open to the moment.