I felt naked today when I went out at lunch for my blip - not naked as in without my pants, but naked as I was relying on my 50mm prime and had no zoom. Of course, I probably would have overcome this at some stage had I not failed at photography rule #1 - charge your battery. That was a whole different type of pants. I blame not using my usual camera and thus having two irrelevant charged-up batteries with me, and not one that fit the one I was using. D'oh!

Anyway, tonight was Stills lecture #6 (the last one! - *sniff*). It brought a smile to my face when I realised what the subject was - Modern Science and Photography, covering Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Quantum Theory and Godel's Theory of Incompleteness. To be fair, I didn't recognise the last one (maybe I skipped that lecture?) but the first two felt like visiting old friends - I studied maths/astronomy at uni. What the lecturer did was explain these theorems, and then showed us some photogrpahs that illustrated, to him, these concepts.

He mentioned Dali in the context of relativity (the melting clocks painting) and showed Leda and the Swan. He likened the point in the middle to a singularity inside a black hole. He also showed a couple of exaples of multiple exposures when talking about quantum theory - relating it to the double-slit experiment where a single photon of light seems to pass through two slits at once.

The final section was about Godel's Incompleteness theory, which in essence a statement that you cannot create a system (eg mathematics) that gets rid of paradoxes - and that there will always be statements that are unprovable. He also mentioned that there's a phrase used by mathematicians when seeing a 'beautiful' equation - 'it's a proof from THE BOOK', ie a proof from God's book. The photograph he showed for this, by Thomas Demand which looks real, but is entirely made out of paper, he imagined as being a representation of the book - it would be more like a storehouse full of proofs, but we could only glimpse a representation of it, not reality.

The photos that he showed - and how he was discussing them made me have a thought (rare, yes I know!) I've been more attracted to the surrealist/abstract painters/photographers which made me wonder if someone coming into photography from a more scientific background, would they be more inclined to be attracted to these types of pictures? I mean, having to sometimes think abstractly to try to understand concepts - or even just accept that you can't picture what you're describing through the use of mathematics - would that make someone more likely to be drawn to these sorts of pictures - or, is it just coincidence?