Beyond the finite

de Iain Boyd Whyte, Roald Hoffmann

"There are many sublimes. In the eighteenth century, the sublime was summoned to address an object that existed beyond reason and measure. Terror, the spontaneous response to mountainous landscapes or great cataracts, gave way to delight as our powers of reason were summoned to reassert the power of the human mind over nature. And our understanding of this process is heightened as contemporary neurophysiology charts the landscape of our emotions and aesthetic judgments. The sublime offers a fruitful meeting ground across many disciplines, for in science as in art, every day brings the entirely new, the extreme, and the unrepresentable. Through contributions from nine prominent scholars, this book looks at the genuine twin claims of art and science to the sublime. The explorations within Beyond the Finite range from the images taken by the Hubble Telescope to David Bohm's quantum romanticism, from Kant and Burke to a "downward spiraling infinity" of the twenty-first century sublime. Squarely positioned at the interface between science and art, this volume captures a remarkable variety of perspectives, with neuroscience, chemistry, astronomy, physics, film, painting, and music-all illuminating the sublime experience."--Jacket.